Features

Administration – Here you’ll find typical administrative tasks such as system restart, updating firmware, setting time/date or checking system status (Figure 9). I did note that the Square One wasn’t able to set its time from any of the several NTP servers I tried (including the default), but perhaps that’s because I had it configured behind another router. Also, for some reason, the LAN traffic counter never seemed to increment even though I had put a lot of traffic through one of the LAN ports.

Figure 9: Square One System Status page

Performance

As an internet router, the Square One performed surprisingly well. Of the 43 products in our Router Performance Charts, in WAN->LAN routing, it placed ninth with a very respectable 91 Mbps—essentially 100 Mbps wire-speed.

Figure 10: WAN > LAN throughput

Similarly, in LAN->WAN routing, it measured 92 Mbps and ranked seventh. And, in a ranking important for P2P users, the Square One supported 176 simultaneous connections.

Of all of the routers in our charts, only the Netgear RangeMax 240 wireless router and the DLink 108G gaming router outperformed the Square One on the simultaneous connection test. Each of the two top ranked products for this test supported 180 connections.

As a NAS, however, performance was very disappointing, coming in at an average of only 2.3 MB/s for write and 2.0 MB/s for read with a 100 Mbps LAN connection. Only one product—the Trendnet TS-U200—was slower.