The Edimax BR-6475nD is one of the cheapest routers in this Labs, and it really does show. It’s a plain white box, with a few blinking lights on the front, whose most striking feature is its two large antennae.
Build quality is ordinary – we had to tighten up a couple of nuts with a pair of pliers to prevent the antennae from flopping around – and the inline power switch looks like it was borrowed from an Ikea table lamp.
What this little router lacks in glamour, however, it makes up for in core power. Despite that bargain-basement price, it’s a fully-fledged dual-band router able to maintain concurrent wireless networks in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands. The two antennae at the rear are removable, so you can replace them with higher gain units if you want to extend the range.
It’s pretty good with the stock prongs, though. At close range over 2.4GHz we measured an average of 13.6MB/sec in our file transfer test, and at 5GHz that rose to 17.5MB/sec – solid, mid-table results. At range, the aerials help it move up the performance table a little, scoring 3.1MB/ sec over 2.4GHz and 2.2MB/sec over 5GHz. The latter result gives this router the third best 5GHz range in the Labs.
And we like the BR-6475nD’s web interface. It isn’t flashy, but it’s clean and easy to find your way around. Plus, there are features that we didn’t expect from a router so cheap. Not only can you use it as a standard wireless router, but it will also function as a WDS bridge, or “universal repeater”, for extending the range of an existing compatible wireless network. There’s also a simple QoS front-end for prioritising traffic by content: giving internal video streaming priority over internet traffic for instance.
One thing that’s missing is a USB socket for sharing storage, printers or connecting 3G dongles. But at such a low price you have to sacrifice something; otherwise, this little Edimax router is a bargain buy
