Product Overview

Buffalo has been doing a better job of late with the industrial design of its products, particularly in its NASes. But a different team of designers must have been assigned to the "AG". With its cabled antenna puck and homely silver/grey plastic enclosure, it's not a particularly elegant product; and even less so when arranged in its vertical mode (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The AG standing up

The front panel has the usual assortment of status lights as you can see in Figure 2 below. Note that Buffalo has done away with the blue LED indication of a gigabit Ethernet connection, judging it to be too bright. So you'll have to depend on your computer to tell you the negotiated link speed.

Figure 2: Front Panel

Connectors on the rear panel (Figure 3) include four 10/100/1000 LAN ports, one 10/100/1000 WAN port and power jack. All ports are auto MDI / MDI-X which means they'll figure out how to connect to whatever you plug into them. There's also a reset-to-factory-defaults switch and a switch to make the AG function as an Access Point. The array of three antennas is hard-wired to the back of the router, although they terminate in miniature connectors on the two radio modules inside.

Figure 3: Rear Panel

Like the D-Link DIR-655 that currently tops our router performance charts, the AG has both gigabit LAN and WAN ports. But as you'll see later, the AG doesn't have comparable routing performance.

Tags: 802.11n, Buffalo, WiFi, Wireless Reviews,

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