EnGenius ESR300H High Power 300Mbps Wireless N Router

Sometimes you just don't need a dual-band, high-end and expensive router. For those with light wireless needs or light budgets; a cheaper, single-band router is fine for web surfing and sharing Internet access and resources across a small wireless network. EnGenius' ESR300H High Power 300 Mbps Wireless N Router is a small, simple single-band router that sells for about $45. It's cheap, it has a surprising number of features, and it's fairly easy to set up. Unfortunately, abysmal throughput in 802.11b/g/n Mixed Mode and some buggy behavior with the software leads me to rate it well below other single-band routers I've tested.

Specs

The ESR300H is a tiny router, much smaller than competing single-band routers on the market (besides most travel routers, that is). It weighs about a pound and measures 9 by 7.8 by 3 inches (HWD). The diminutive device has a WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) button on top, along with seven tiny LED lights with labels that those with less-than-perfect eyesight may need a magnifying glass to read.

The LEDs represent power, wireless and WAN status. There's also a corresponding LED for each of the LAN ports. The four LAN ports on the back panel are only Fast Ethernet 10/100?no Gigabit support. The router also has dual external 2DBi antennas. ?The vendor reports maximum throughput at 300 Mbps.

The most interesting physical characteristic of this router is how small it is. Overall, it's an innocuous-looking little plastic black box with two antennas sticking out. Since current routers tend to have internal antennas, the EHR300H looks dated.

Setup

The router ships with a CD, although you can set up the device manually without the disc. Setup is not wireless; a computer hard-wired to the router is required. The EnGenius Smart Wizard interface launches from the CD. The interface is sharp and helpful enough to walk a user through the preliminary setup steps: connecting cables, powering up the router, and getting to the configuration page.

The problem is that once you first get to the router's configuration page it is not clear in the interface what you should do next. At this point of setup, the router was connected to the Internet and up and running but I still had not configured an SSID, security or any other wireless settings. The interface gives several options: "Home," "Wizard," "Network Settings," and "Logout." I selected "Wizard" because the router still needed to be configured, but I can imagine this confusing users who already launched the EnGenius Smart Wizard.

Selecting "Wizard" within the interface did take me to the wireless configuration screen. A feature I found bothersome was security setup. Instead of displaying the usual security choices like WEP, WPA, WPA2 , the ESR300H's interface allows users to set security levels as "None," "Medium," or "High." It is not clear which level of encryption you are selecting until after you make the choice. For instance, in the interface I selected "High." Once I clicked "Next" to apply the setting, I then saw in the status screen area of the interface that my security was set to "WPA2-PSK." I want to know exactly what security level I am applying before I apply it.

Features, Performance and Some Testing Road Bumps

EnGenius certainly packs a lot of functionality into the device, but not all of the features work well. Setting parental controls, which really is just an Access Control List, proved to be messy. Even worse, once I defined a URL or keyword to block for a specific machine connected to the routers, that machine was not blocked from accessing the URL or keyword from a browser. Parental controls did not work even after a browser cache flush.

I ran into another issue attempting to login to the interface from the computer I used to set up the router. The computer was now connected wirelessly to the router rather than wired, so it had a new IP address. When I attempted to get into the administrator interface the system flashed the message, "Duplicate administrator. If you want to login from this PC, please logout or wait for timeout." I waited about ten minutes and still got the message. Reopening my browser session enabled me to login. I suppose this is a security measure, but it seems flaky in operation.

The router can run in AP or WDS (repeater) mode. It supports up to 4 SSIDs, firewall mapping, DMZ and VPN Pass-through. QoS, NAT, Wake Up on LAN and UPnP are some additional features. The QoS is actually one of the more straight-forward and easy to configure modules within the interface.

The router delivered terrible performance in Mixed Mode, among the worst we've seen for single-band routers in the last two years:

As you can see, Engenius' own ESR9855G Multimedia Enhanced Wireless 300N Gaming Router router had far superior throughput results.

Here are the throughput results in 802.11N-only mode:

The results in 802.11n-only mode are much better. However, most users of single-band routers often have legacy devices that do not connect at the 802.11n standard. Preferable, a single-band router will have its best results in Mixed Mode.

The ESR300H Verdict: Skip It

Engenius' ESR300H is a router at a great price. Yet that low price point comes with other costs: abysmal performance in Mixed Mode and wonky software. A better choice for an affordable, single-band router is Engenius' ESR9855G or our Editors' Choice, the Cisco Linksys E1200 Wireless-N Router.

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