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James B.

James B.

Joined on 03/04/11

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Product Reviews
product reviews
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Most Favorable Review

WPA2 Unstable; WPA Seems Fine So Far

TRENDnet TEW-670AP 300Mbps Concurrent Dual Band Wireless N Access Point
TRENDnet TEW-670AP 300Mbps Concurrent Dual Band Wireless N Access Point

Pros: (My first wireless installation!) Easy setup. Like the config-backup feature (haven't tested restore, however). Besides the WPA2 hassles, biggest hassle for me was teaching my LAN server/router/firewall to recognize 192.168.10.x addresses as local (was previously narrowed to 192.168.0.x), which was not TrendNet's fault at all. Signal strength in four-story townhouse good, but did relocate device from basement to first floor to improve it anyway.

Cons: Unstable WPA2. No warning that new "admin" password being entered is too long, this threw me for awhile as I couldn't log back in until I did factory reset and experimented. Could use a persistent/static, more-detailed event log. Firmware on device says "v1.0.2" but the v1.0.2.3 download from the site results in the same thing, which wasted a bit of time. Tools/Diagnostic/Ping doesn't seem to work ("Network is unreachable" for 192.168.0.x addresses); maybe supports only 192.168.10.x, but that's not obvious from the tool's page (and it can definitely "see" an internal-only web server at 192.168.0.1, so that works fine). Unclear what I should do in terms of antennae positioning. 5G seems to work fine from my Windows 7 laptop.

Overall Review: I ran into the WPA2-unreliability issue when I configured "Highest" (WPA2) security for both 2.4G and 5G. Backing down one "level" to WPA seems, at first blush, to have worked around the problem, which was observed on my Droid 2 (but not my Windows 7 laptop, though I didn't test that much). (Note that I did not myself observe the unit "rebooting" when WPA2 was configured, because it was out of my sight most of these times.) The behavior I observed: initial attempts to connect would often succeed then drop for minutes at a time, then might finally succeed, perhaps even stay connected for a long period. (Non-wireless DHCP server helped evidence the short-term success: the logs would show my Droid 2 requesting and being given an IP address, shortly before the Droid's wireless setup panel showed the wireless connection as disconnected, after which it would soon retry.)