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petewiththemeat

New Around Here
Hello Tim and others involved in the reviews of routers and other devices and thanks for doing it.
Regarding routers I am pondering if it is possible to also mention how the web-interface
on the different routers behave and how responsive they are when changing pages and applying settings.
Got an R7000 and noticed that applying settings took a very long time to complete but also during this time
I could not access the internet and sometimes it would also hang.
So I think a responsive menu system that is fast and applies settings fast at least gives some indication
about what quality to expect from the manufacturer regarding programming practicies :)

Now that routers are used more as a nas also, is it possible to test how good the dlna upnp mechanisms work
for example if it has problems serving typical movie formats found on torrent sites etc and if a manufacturer supports a little more than others etc..
Maybe this is hard to test but if you have a collection of small movie clips you could test this when performing the storage test.
Thanks
 
Thanks for the suggestions. We try to mention admin GUI responsiveness. We'll try a little harder to be more consistent in its mention.

Keep in mind most companies use the same admin GUI across all their routers. So we often just point readers to a previous review for the features section.

DLNA UPnP is a device locaton and file enumeration technology. It doesn't affect how a file is served. Router storage features don't yet (if ever) include transcoding.

We cover antenna configuration including upgradability and connector type in the reviews and Router Finder. We don't care about antenna configuration, just wireless performance.
 
I must have missed this with antennas and you are right it can be seen in the pictures many times :)
I am not sure but I think for example linksys uses twonky as some kind of media server/streamer and that it can
stream external subtitles - features like these are nice to know or if it can stream a bluray image etc..
regards
 
Thanks for the suggestions. We try to mention admin GUI responsiveness. We'll try a little harder to be more consistent in its mention.

Keep in mind most companies use the same admin GUI across all their routers. So we often just point readers to a previous review for the features section.

Very hard to be objective there - what fine for some, might not be good for others - but it would be interesting to note browser compatability - webkit (Chrome/Safari) vs. Gekko (Mozilla Firefox) vs. IE (ouch...) as some of the WebUI's are getting rather Web2.0/HTML5 like...

DLNA UPnP is a device locaton and file enumeration technology. It doesn't affect how a file is served. Router storage features don't yet (if ever) include transcoding.

If it has a media server, or even FileSharing, it's something that can be commented on - problem there is that DLNA/uPNP/Airplay/blah... it's so implementation dependent - for example, there's a tier one vendor that doesn't even do uPNP, they do NAT-PMP - but they work fine for most purposes - there's a lot of client concerns if one were to use that as a "scoring" criteria. So I probably wouldn't - what works fine on a Mac, might have issues on Windows... and vice-versa...

And while media transcoding hasn't been a major feature yet in SOHO AP's, it's starting to become a key feature in the Home NAS segment... and Moore's law suggests that we'll see it soon enough in the AP/Router space - most of the vendors in the AP/Router segment, their arms race is on the WiFi at present...

We cover antenna configuration including upgradability and connector type in the reviews and Router Finder. We don't care about antenna configuration, just wireless performance.

I agree here... wireless performance is much more important that how many pointy things, or absence thereof are on the device.

And I'll reiterate that power consumption and efficiency is something folks might care about - as we pour in more radios, bigger chipsets, more features... and these things are on 24/7, it would be nice to know, and reward vendors that find a more efficient way, what the power usage is on idle and under max load...
 
If possible VPN benchmark charts would be great.

For OpenVPN and PPTP, along with L2TP/IPSec if supported...

(PPTP, while not totally secure, is fast, and still is good enough, and support by just about everything, OpenVPN typically needs a client download for most operating systems).

If the vendor offers the options, it would be nice to know, but absence of those options shouldn't be a ding on the vendor - VPN support would be a bonus point perhaps...
 
A point to consider perhaps - this is all good feedback - but test resources and time are limited - the more test requirement asks, the longer it'll take for reviews to be released...
 
once you get the test set up than it takes little time to test more things. The issue is with better hardware coming out it becomes more difficult to test it. I dont even have the means to test my mikrotik CCR1036 yet though it has never used more than 2 cores unless i do something nonsensical and irrelevant like flooding itself with its packet generator on a virtual interface and seeing it generate and drop like 80Gb/s of traffic. It still works fine with normal traffic even when i do that.

Also once something new comes out you than have to retest older stuff for every new feature you want to add
 

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