On paper, the TL-WR941ND seems like most TP-Link products: inexpensive and lacking in pizzazz, yet basically sound. When we reviewed it as a consumer router, it scored well. Compared with most of the other products we tested for our business router roundup, it’s a no-frills device - four 10/100 Ethernet ports, and support for 802.11b, g and n.

But the disappointment set in quickly. The documentation comes on an 8cm CD. That’s a no-no in our book because such discs often disagree with slot-loading drives. Coupled with the absence of an Ethernet cable, this smacks of penny-pinching.

Who approved the firmware for release? A web interface that puts the important information in a frame that requires horizontal scrolling unless the screen is around 1900 pixels wide should have been sent straight back to the development team.

The setup wizard is straightforward, but incomplete. Most importantly, it doesn’t include wireless security settings. It’s also a little annoying to keep being told that changes won’t take effect until a reboot when there’s no button to trigger a reboot. You need to visit System Tools>Reboot for that.

So what’s good about the TL-WR941ND? It’s got the usual features including WPS, IP address reservation, UPnP, a firewall, and QoS rules (that allocate minimum and maximum bandwidth to particular applications).

So how does it perform? In our testing, not very well, though we're told it's a known issue, and that an upcoming upgrade should fix things.

The ‘same room’ times were the worst we recorded, averaging 121 seconds with high variability. That’s substantially worse than most of the others managed in the long-range test.

The ‘next room’ test yielded a very respectable 25 seconds, but the long-range results were so variable that we’re not reporting an average. Suffice it to say that the best was just short of three minutes, which was worse than was saw with any other router that could sustain a connection at this distance.

TP-Link claims the three transmit, three receive design provides improved transmission rates and stability, but that’s not what we saw. As our results were all over the place, we ran another set of trials and the results were consistent with the originals.

We’re at a loss to explain the problem. To rule out environmental issues, we immediately retested another router, which delivered the same performance as it had originally.

We also had the opportunity to try the predecessor TL-WR841ND ($114.95) with beta firmware, and it turned in an impressive 5, 21 and 13 seconds despite being a two-antenna design.

So while it might be unfair to completely rule out the TL-WR941ND on the basis of its performance in our particular test environment, we are unable to recommend it at this stage. But a firmware update that delivers the performance we saw with the TL-WR841ND would make it great value for these cost-conscious times. Keep an eye out for this, as the TP-Link will be worth considering.