Telstra Turbo 7 Series Wireless Gateway
Staff writers
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Nov 6, 2008 10:28 AM
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Telstra | http://www.telstra.com.au
RRP: $529 (time of review)
Performance: 
Features & Design: 
Value for money: 
Overall Rating:
User Rating: No user ratings.
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Good value if purchased with a plan, the telstra’s speed impresses
The Telstra Turbo 7 Series Wireless Gateway is fairly bristling with antennas, but only one of them is used for its 802.11b/g Wi-Fi signal. The other two are for connecting to Telstra’s ultra-fast HSDPA network.
The Turbo is locked to Telstra/BigPond, and access is via a slot in the side for a SIM card. Slot one in, set up the modem via the Turbo’s HTTP server, and you should be up and running. The real value for money comes if you buy the Turbo with a 24-month 3G broadband plan, which drops the price to a reasonable $149. Buy it outright and you’re in for a shock – the price rockets to an outrageous $529.
In our speed tests the Turbo narrowly beat the D-Link for pure throughput. A room away from the router we saw an impressive 20Mb/sec for our single 100MB file. Moving thousands of small files more than halved the speed, but 9.6Mb/sec still makes the Turbo the fastest device on test.
It doesn’t lack features elsewhere. An SPI/NAT firewall is included, as is support for UPnP and Dynamic DNS. Denial of Service detection is also included. The only major tick box not filled is QoS – a glaring omission in a router that will be connected to slower-than-average broadband connections.
The Turbo is nearly fully-featured, though, and is reasonable value as well. We can even stand the fact that it’s locked to Telstra’s network, on the grounds that it’s one of the networks with the most coverage of Australia, besides offering impressive connection speeds.