Airlive WN-5000R Wireless Router
Manufactured by: Provided By: AirLive
Price : US$99
Reviewed by:
Date : November 14th 2007

The WN-5000R Wireless Router in detail

The AirLive WN 5000R is a 4 port wireless router giving you the option to connect 4 devices through the LAN ports. It supports PPTP, L2TP, PPPoE, DHCP, Fixed, and Bigpond ISP connections. A WAN port is provided so that you can bridge an ADSL modem for internet access.

There are 3 distinctly visible antennas which uses AirLive’s 2T3R Technology. Here’s a quote from AirLive describing this technology.
“AirLive’s 2 transmitter 3 receiver (2T3R) technology ensures reliable, cost-effective wireless connectivity at high throughput over an extended range. Optimized RF architecture and baseband algorithms provide super performance to your network.”

Coupled with 802.11n’s specifications and AirLive’s True MIMO Technology the WN 5000R is designed to give users faster speeds as well as a wider coverage than standard 802.11g routers.

The Basic idea behind MIMO technology is that it uses several antennas to transfer multiple data streams from A to B. MIMO is able to simultaneously transmit 3 streams and receive 2 streams of data. This effectively allows more data to be transferred in a shorter period thus giving wider coverage over which data can be transmitted.

This is certainly a great feature in comparison to conventional 802.11g routers because if you fall into the blue category in the picture above you would not get more than 1Mbps transfer speeds. We weren’t able to fully test this claim by actually measuring 300 feet from the router, but from around 150 feet we were able to get around 140Mbps. Considering that these tests were done indoors where are lot of barriers exists as well, the 802.11n standard proves to be true in its claims. Also at this distance we were getting only getting 2 bars from one of our 802.11g based routers, while we had full reception with the WN 5000R.

Another nice feature most new routers come out with is WPS (WiFi Protected Setup). The WN 5000R supports this and it’s placed right next to the RESET switch as seen in the above picture. WPS is a standard create by Wi-Fi alliance to simplify the process of building a secured home wireless network. In another words, it makes the process of making wireless encryption much easier. A WPS enabled device will feature a push button where users simply push a button on both the AP/Router and wireless USB dongle to setup the secured connection. Here’s a link to a pdf file detailing out how to setup WPS and get everything up and running. LINK

There are 8 indicator lights on the top front section of the WN 5000R to indicate LAN, WAN and WLAN functionality.

That pretty much covers the physical characteristics of the WN 5000R, so lets take a look at the web configuration interface.

 

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