The newest consumer wireless router on the market comes from an unlikely source: Western Digital. Yes, that Western Digital known mainly for storage products, today debuted a new lineup of wireless routers which includes the My Net N900 ($179.99 MSRP) dual-band router. I spent about a week testing the N900 prior to today's announcement; the device is a beautifully engineered, high-performing piece of networking hardware.?
WD's N900 is the fastest router we've tested to date at 2.4 GHz, although not the fastest at 5 GHz. It's also not the most feature-packed router available on the market, but it has the features the average user needs to manage and set up a rich, secured networking environment that deftly handles multimedia content. Plus, the WD N900's software delivers a user experience the level of which is rare to find in home networking The My Net N900 is a delightful surprise from a vendor not known for making wireless routers and has a simple, easy-to-remember product name.
Specs
The N900 supports up to 450 Mbps on both bands. The casing is stylish with a silver fencing running around the body. This device is longer than typical consumer routers because it has seven Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports; most routers even for small business, have four LAN ports as standard. The rear panel also has a Gigabit WAN port, two USB 2.0 ports for sharing storage and printers and a power on and off button. I'm not too keen on the positioning of the power on and off button because it's adjacent to the USB ports. You have to be careful when connecting and removing USB devices to not accidently turn the router off.
The front panel has four LEDs representing power, wireless status, WAN activity and WPS. There's a single-touch WPS button also on front for push-button connection of WPS-enabled clients.
Setup
The N90's ease of setup rivals Cisco Linksys' E- and EA- series of routers. I had the device setup in two minutes. The router ships with a setup and resource CD; the CD's sleeve has illustrations that detail how to connect wireless clients and Windows. I set up the device?using a Windows 7 laptop as per the instructions, which requires connecting the laptop to a LAN port on the router and then? just breezed through the setup wizard.
The set up process automatically configures both bands in Mixed Mode to support 802.11n and legacy clients, sets security, and generate a pass key to access both wireless networks. During setup, the wizard provides useful information such as why users need two bands and other networking tidbits.
Once setup is complete, the software goes online to check for firmware and then asks you to install additional software. This isn't some gimmicky bloat ware; WD offers three free utilities to enhance your wireless networking experience: WD Print Share for managing shared printers, WD Quick View for monitoring router status, and My Net View, which is a very basic? diagnostic tool that provides some good "at-a-glance" information about a network.? Overall, the setup process is flawless.?
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