Billion BiPAC 6300NXL review

Testing with our Centrino 2 laptop’s integrated wireless adaptor, we got transfer speeds of 18.9Mbit/s at 1m, 19.5Mbit/s at 10m and 7.9Mbit/s at 20m. Billion’s own BiPac 3010ND adaptor fared even worse: 18.7Mbit/s at 1m, 14.9Mbit/s at 10m and 7.1Mbit/s at 20m. It’s worth noting that these were the best results we were able to obtain after significant trial and error using different channels. The router’s ineffective automatic channel detection always defaulted to channel 11, which proved to be cluttered and slow in our labs.

If wireless isn’t very important to you, then this £80 router is otherwise well equipped with features. You can set up your 3G connection as a backup option should your main internet connection fail, isolate different Ethernet ports from one another to create separate virtual networks and set port ranges or IP addresses for QoS traffic prioritization. Unlike more home-oriented hardware, you have to configure this manually rather than use pull-down menus that let you choose popular programs or types of traffic to prioritise, but this also gives you a great deal more control over what gets dibs on your net connection.

However, no concessions are made to those who aren’t very comfortable with networking or prepared to read through all the necessary documentation, even for something that’s usually as simple as plugging in an external USB drive and making it accessible to the network. Even if you are a fan of Billion’s no-nonsense interface, £70 is a lot to pay given this router’s failings. We prefer the similarly priced Tenda W1800R, which supports the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard.