Tenda W300D review

You’re also asked to enter your internet connection type, user name and password. Finally, enter an easily memorable passphrase into the Security Key box. This is your wireless password, vital to keeping your network secure. Unusually, even in the router’s advanced settings, we weren’t able to disable channel-bonding, which we usually do while testing, as doing this typically improves transfer speeds.

Nonetheless, the W300D’s performance in our wireless throughput was acceptable in our near and far tests using our laptop’s Centrino 2 wireless chipset. At 1m, we got transfer speed of 31.3Mbit/s, and we got 27.7Mbit/s at 10m, but we unable to complete the test at 20m.We also tested the router with a £7 Tenda W311U USB Wi-Fi adaptor and got similar results of 37.2 Mbit/s at 1m and 23.5m at 10m, which show that it’s really not worth buying the adaptor, particularly as ours was unable to even see the router when it was set to channels 12 or 13.

This is a cheap router with a decent interface, so we were prepared to be quite forgiving when it came to performance. If you need to shunt a lot of data around on your wireless network, or play games using it, then this isn’t the router for you. If you primarily use a wired connection and just need to be able to get your phone or tablet online, then this basic router is a bargain. It wins our Budget Buy award.