The Products

The products I rounded up for the test are an interesting cross-section of the current MIMO market including names you'll know and some you may not. By the way, I invited Linksys to participate in this competition, but they declined to supply product.

Airlink101 is a relatively small networking gear supplier, known primarily to customers of Fry's and Outpost.com. I included them in the face-off because their products use chipsets from RaLink, a Taiwanese Wi-Fi chipmaker whose products are helping to put even more of a squeeze on the already virtually non-existent margins suffered by WLAN chipmakers. The router is also the only MIMO product in this competition to have upgradable antennas and also has the distinction of having the lowest price (at time of review).

I included two sets of gear from Belkin, both of which use chipsets from Airgo Networks. I wanted to measure the performance difference between the original 2 X 3 (two transmit, three receive channels) TrueMIMO chipset used in the Pre-N gear and newer, less-expensive 2 X 2 TrueG chipset. If you use the "Check Latest Price" links below, however, you'll see that pricing of the Pre-N router has been reduced to pretty much erase any price advantage that the G Plus product was intended to have. Go figure...