Thread: Compex NP25G

THE COMPEX NP25G did not inspire much confidence when we took it out of the box. The build quality is quite poor, and the device did not feel like it would be able to compete with the other, more well-known brands. The poor web-interface did nothing to counteract this feeling, though it did have all the features. It looked extremely dated, almost like looking at a webpage from 1999. It did have some interesting features though. This was the only router to allow bandwidth limiting, both on the WAN and on the LAN. You can set an IP address to only use 20 kbps, for example, and the router will set the limit. This feature is very useful in academic or office environments, and it worked reasonablywell, with occasional hiccups. You can set up a virtual Access Point as well.



Unfortunately, just when we were starting to think that this router might not be so bad after all, it got comprehensively massacred in our performance tests. Things started off innocuously enough at a distance of ten feet, with the router averaging 9.1 Mbps. This was slow, but bearable. But at any.distance above fifteen feet, this router simply failed to work. At forty feet, we recorded a throughput of 0.1 Mbps. This was by far the worst of the lot. This router also slowed down a lot with WPA2 security enabled. At ten feet, it clocked only 4.8 Mbps, almost half of what it managed with no security. At forty feet, with WPA encryption enabled, the throughput dropped to 0.08 Mbps. The only thing that kept this router from coming last in our shootout was the higher price of our last placed router, and the fact that this router had some unique features. But we wouldn't really recommend thiS, one.