UPDATED: ZyXEL Prestige 660HW review

UPDATED: price correction - the correct price is £47.

In a world where most homes and offices have broadband connections, wireless ADSL routers are ten a penny, so finding ways to distinguish between them has become the preoccupation of manufacturers. ZyXEL's Prestige 660HW is a product that will stand out from the crowd thanks to its combination of features, advanced technology and ease of use.

Configuring a wireless broadband router isn't always simple, so we were sceptical about the Prestige's promise of zero-configuration internet access. But this was unfounded because provided the Prestige is plugged correctly into your ADSL-enabled phone line, it automatically detects all the required settings. All you have to do is enter your ISP's user name and password, and it does the rest. we wish other manufactuers would take a leaf from Zyxel's book. You can access other features, such as the wireless encryption settings, through a fairly standard web setup page. Once you're logged in, a bit of browsing reveals many features for advanced users. For example, there's a useful media bandwidth management section that allows you to control the amount of bandwidth used by certain applications. There's also a sophisticated firewall with built-in content filtering and a range of other features - a handy addition for security conscious users. The Prestige is future-proof too, as it supports the ADSL 2/2+ standards, which will offer higher ADSL speeds when they become widely available.

We didn't expect the Prestige to deliver the high transfer speeds of the draft-n and MIMO wireless routers we reviewed last month. It costs a lot less than those products, so all it had to do to justify its price was perform well enough for most home users. Unfortunately, it only managed 8.8Mbit/s in our short-range test and 4.3Mbit/s in our long-range test - both speeds are well below what we'd expect of an 54Mbit/s 802.11g network.