Lab

Wireless-n routers

Wireless networking has been adopted incredibly quickly in the past few years. With the widespread take-up of broadband and an increasing shift from desktop PCs towards laptops in the home, it's been a natural progression. And, as wireless networks have spread, so have the devices that take advantage of them. Internet radios, smartphones and handheld internet devices such as the iPod Touch all now have Wi-Fi built in.

Yet the 802.11g technology that knits most home networks together is beginning to creak at the seams. A top theoretical speed of 54Mb/sec might be fine for browsing the web and streaming audio, but when it comes to streaming video, transferring large files and backing up to NAS devices, it's frustratingly slow. And at distances further than a room away, those already-slow speeds drop dramatically.

Faster, more reliable wireless networking is here, however, and now that the 802.11n certification process is under way, (which means devices should work reliably together), it's finally a practical proposition.

So this month we've gathered together every wireless-n draft-2.0 ADSL modem router on the market to find out if it's worth forking out for an upgrade. And we've carried out our most thorough tests yet to find out how fast and far the new generation of routers will allow your network to go.