US Robotics Wireless MAXg USB Adapter review

Verdict:

Review Date: 18 Apr 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

US Robotics' Wireless MAXg ADSL2+ Gateway is one of the largest routers in the group. Its grey plastic finish feels tough and well made.

The setup CD is an odd hybrid. It will configure your ADSL connection, but launches a web browser to set up wireless encryption. The web-configuration page is the easiest to use in the group. All the options are arranged in drop-down menus, which make it easy to find some of the more obscure options. It also has a USB port, which lets you share your USB printer wirelessly over the network.

The US Robotics router is the only 54g router in the group with a turbo mode. The manufacturer claims that it boosts its throughput to 125Mbit/s with a suitable adaptor. As with the Draft-N routers, the actual figure was far short of this, but in conjunction with the PC Card adaptor the router was still quicker than the other 54g equipment at short ranges. At 1m we managed to transfer files at 28.57Mbit/s, but a speed of 15.19Mbit/s at 15m was worse than the Buffalo router could manage.

The USB adaptor was slower, with a file-transfer speed of 21.13Mbit/s at 1m and 13.2Mbit/s at 15m. The US Robotics router was the fastest 54g device with our Centrino notebook at 15m, managing 20.47Mbit/s. It struggled at very long range, though, managing just 4.66Mbit/s in the 25m test.

US Robotics' Wireless MAXg ADSL2+ Gateway has the best web interface in the group and respectable performance over medium distances. It's not as fast as we were expecting, though, and is far more expensive than the other 54g routers.

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