Buffalo WCR-GN review

The rest of the web management is quite hard to understand for novices, but there are plenty of options in there. A full IP Filter firewall lets you easily block or allow services to and from the internet, provided you know the protocol and port address. There are a few default services put in for HTTP, FTP and a few others, though.

Full QoS settings let you prioritise traffic to the internet. It’s a bit of a pain to set up and you need to first set your internet connection’s upload limit in Kbit/s. From there you can define services by protocol and destination port and protocol, but there are no predefined services in this list. Each service can have one of three priority levels (High, Medium or Low); there’s no definition of what these actual do, but it stands to reason that it’s just that High has priority of Medium, which has priority over low.

Once the router’s configured correctly performance is the thing you’ll be interested in, and the WCR-GN isn’t bad. Using our Centrino 2 laptop we managed 35.46Mbit/s at close range, and 37.02Mbit/s at 10m. Moving to 20m away we managed just 10.54Mbit/s, which is fine for web browsing but not too much else.

Using the Buffalo WLI-UC-GNM wireless USB adaptor, we got similar results at close range and 10m. However, the ultra-slim adaptor only managed 1.7Mbit/s at 20m, which is pretty poor.

It’s not a bad router for the price and there are a lot of features to configure. However, the TP-Link TL-WR741ND does the same job, has slightly better performance and is a few pounds cheaper.