Thread: Engeniu5 ECB-1220R wireless routers

ENGENIUS IS ALSO a new entrant in the wireless router race. First impressions were positive, with the device looking and feeling well put together. It has a single external antenna, and the all-white finish was reminiscent of the Netgear routers. The Web-interface is unnecessarily complex though. This device can act as a router, bridge, access point, or bridge router, and the Web-interface changes completely depending on what mode you've chosen. This gets confusing, since features appear and disappear. We can appreciate the reasoning behil}d this decision, but the implementation could have been better. The design should be tweaked to make it clear that the device has changed modes, and therefore, the options are different.



In the performance tests, the router suffered from a poor implementation ofWPA security. With security dis¬abled, it got scores of 11. 5, 7.9, and 2.5 Mbps at ten, twenty, and forty feet respectively. With WPA2 enabled, these figures dropped to 9.4, 3.8, and 0.6 Mbps at the three distances. WPA2 security is extremely important, and this disappointing performance made this router plunge down the charts. It was helped on its way down by the lack of any unique features (unlike Compex, which at least tried to be different), and the high price. There's really nothing much to say about this router, except to hope for better performance next time around .