Linksys by Cisco WRT610N review

Linksys by Cisco’s unobtrusive flying saucer design is common across its consumer range of routers, and the cable-compatible WRT610N is no different. Place it on a shelf in your living room and it won’t stick out like a sore thumb.

It will do wonders for wireless performance though. It’s a dual-band router with two radios, which means legacy devices can access the network over 2.4GHz while modern laptops connect over 5GHz at the same time.

Other features worthy of note are four Gigabit Ethernet ports and a USB port that allows you to share external storage devices, stream files from it to network-attached UPnP media players, and act as an FTP server.

We test router speeds using a laptop equipped with Intel’s dual band WiFi Link 5300 chip and transfer files to and from this laptop to another connected to the router via a Gigabit Ethernet port.All-round performance in our tests was good.

And, once we’d upgraded to the latest firmware, we achieved file transfers from the WRT610N to the test laptop of up to 118Mbits/sec at close range over 5GHz, and 85Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz.

Its speeds aren’t quite as quick as the some other simultaneous dual-band routers we’ve tested, but perhaps more importantly it boasts good range in both bands; in our long-range transmit tests it achieved 82Mbits/sec over 2.4GHz and 54Mbits/sec over 5GHz – very fast indeed.

It performed well in our torture tests too, allowing us to watch an iPlayer stream, listen to internet radio, make a VoIP call, connect to our office VPN and carry out file transfers at the same time without falling over or choking bandwidth to the audio and video streams.

There are a couple of things missing – no hardware VPN support nor guest network support – but the WRT610N is otherwise a quick, competent dual-band router with good range at a reasonable price. For high performance wireless, it gets our thumbs-up.