In a recent visit to my local Best Buy, I noticed several wireless routers touting the new 802.11n Wi-fi standard. Interested in whether the advertised speed and range improvements (anywhere from 4x-15x 802.11g), I was interested in finding some independent reviews on the performance and reliability. Now, considering the limited space of my apartment in Manhattan, range isn't so much a concern, but of course--I was interested in anything that would give me a stronger, faster connection.

Navigating the reviews seems to be a challenge in itself, and overall if you were take them at face value you would stay away from draft-N until some much-needed improvements are made. After some research, I concluded that draft-N was all marketing at this point and consumer demand for faster, more reliable wireless has forced all the home network manufacturers to rush unfinished, buggy products to market and worry about supporting them later.

Yesterday, I changed my mind and decided to pick up one of the new routers to give it a try. I purchased the Netgear Rangemax Next Wireless-N Router Gigabit Edition. So far, I am very satisfied. At $139, it was the most expensive, but it also was the only gigabit router (for wired LAN connections) and seemed to offer all the other features I would need. The true test will be how it performs over long-term, however, my initial tests show speeds of at least double my previous Linksys SRX200 Wireless-G router.

I have a Buffalo Linkstation Pro NAS which I use as a backup device. Files which used to be a pain to access over Wi-fi due to a weak signal or dropped connection, are now accessible as if they were on my local drive.

I am still using the embedded wireless-G adapter in my laptop. My connection status shows a constant speed of 54 Mbs and a signal quality of Excellent--which had previously been rare, even though I'm often only 10-15 feet away from the router. I've often wondered if the problems I've previously had were due to inference from the 40-something other Wi-fi networks that appear when I scan for available networks, or a problem with the hardware itself. Anyway, I hope to increase performance even more when I upgrade to a wireless-N adaptor.

Setup and configuration was rather painless. I plugged it in, connected my cable modem to the WAN port, then connected the router to my laptop's ethernet port and ran Setup from the CD. I enabled wireless, supplied my previous SSID and WEP passphrase, changed the default admin password, and I was able to connect my laptop without changing any settings. The only annoyance I've had so far is that the router wants to reboot itself everytime a configuration change is made. Whenever the device resets, it takes several minutes and a couple times it didn't come back online to where I could connect. In these cases, I had to unplug and replug the router to get it back online. Other than that, the router has been working great and has kept my Wi-fi connection fast and stable.