Linksys WRT 310N

Full Review

The swooping profile vaguely reminds us of the B-2 Stealth Bomber, and it certainly wins in the looks department. Thankfully, it’s no slouch on the performance front either. The performance under the 802.11 G protocol is very good at distances up to about forty feet. After this the signal begins to taper off a bit, and performance drops. That’s a penalty for the concealed antennae. But in a smallish house or an apartment, this will do just fine. We got speeds of 21 Mb/s at ten feet from the router, 16 Mb/s at nearly thirty feet, and 4 Mb/s at sixty feet. The two closer distances gave us the fastest speeds of all the routers we’ve tested, but at longer distances it’s outdone by quite a few routers. The Draft-N performance, on the other hand, is simply fantastic. The speeds almost tripled, from 21 Mb/s to 60 Mb/s at close range, and stayed at a healthy 37 Mb/s at thirty feet from the router. Even at sixty feet away, we were able to record 19 Mb/s. These speeds make us want to upgrade to Draft -N at once. Sadly, most laptops in the market today still don’t give Draft -N as an option. Setting up the router is very easy, thanks to the Linksys EasyLink Advisor, or LELA. LELA, though it sounds like an old song, it is actually very easy to use. It walks you through all the steps and gets you up and running quickly. This is a very good router, specially if you have a Draft-N compatible notebook.

Bottom Line

This sleek router has great performance over shorter distances, but suffers a bit at long range. Linksys routers have always been easy to use.