TRENDnet 450Mbps Dual Band Wireless N HD Media Bridge TEW-680MB

This bridge is very picky on how you place it. You want to face it with the side facing where the router is... Which if you looking at it strait on, it should be the left hand side. Which would be the top of the board where the antenna are located. This will boost your signal levels a good bit.

Just for the record this bridge is paired with DIR-825 router. Which will be upgraded soon to the E4200V2. Then I can test the 3 stream tech and see if signal level's improve. All testing was done on the 5GHz band, with the router being in the basement with antenna horizontal and the brige laying on it's left hand side above the router 2 floors above. Signal levels reported by TEW-680MB in the 50% range with quality in the 90% range. Rx in the 270-300 Mbit range. TX in the 160-216 Mbit range. Router reports 100% signal and 270-300 Mbit. Location is isolated, free of other wireless traffic.

The manual this comes with is worthless. No website info on what the settings and readings were. If you don't use the wizzard and set up the bridge, it will change the IP of the bridge... Making it so you can not access it again unless you reset it. Even the web address won't work.

I called tech support up to ask a question and were 100% worthless. I asked what ACK failures were from and they told me from my PC. I knew it wasn't... So I wasted 30 min on the phone with the guy from India.

***Update***

I did alot of research in the settings on this bridge and found that it liked channel 44 and MSC setting of 11... Signal has jumped to 70's and now is rock solid on Link Quality at 100%.

Retries for TX where 10%+ before... After 0.005% Retry rate. Error rate was 5%+ now is 0%.

Errors for RX where 5-10% before... After 0.001% Error rate.

TX @ 120 Mbits solid, RX @ 300Mbit solid.

Very happy. Raised score 1 star.

Still not happy with support or information on this bridge.

Once tweaked this bridge is better then my DAP-1522.

The Trendnet TEW-680MB is a very good product. I paired it with my Netgear WNDR4500 N900 router. I can stream 1080P on 5ghz with no buffering at all on a 2hr movie from 40 ft through 2 walls. I configured the unit in about 2-3 minuter using my netbook. In a week it has never needed to be rebooted. I plan on buying another one for another distant desktop. The product is made in Taiwan not Communist China. Every manufactured product has a few defective units that slip by. If someone gets one you will surely hear about it. The vast majority are good but people are less likely to write a review. I highly recommend this product.

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I needed improved network speeds to my digital media in my living room so I decided to try one of these connected to my network. Specifically, I have a home server with a gigbit ethernet port and a Belkin N-750 dual band router also having a gigbit port. I connected both up to the high and low bands and my video became rock solid. I can't see any difference from my satellite signal (although this was not a scientific test).

As an experiment, I connected a laptop to one of the ports on the bridge, shut off the built in wireless system and tried transfering three digital video files to the server while timing the transfer wih a stop watch. The time for a standard wifi N transfer was 6:40 and over the bridge was a little over 1 minute. When I computed the transfer speed, I showed 15.85 MB/sec versus 4.2 for standard wifi Network. This was almost a 400% improvement in speed.

I put all of this in so that you can compare your network configuration with mine and get some idea whether the system makes sense for your installation.

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Purchased the TEW-680MB last week for my living room, it was to replace my 4 year old Dlink DAP-1522. This product is so much better and easier to use. I have 4 devices in my living room connected to it: LG TV, Xbox 360, Panasonic Blu-Ray Player, and my Onkyo Receiver.

There is no lag at all between this device and my router (which is the Linksys E4200 V1) which is in another room. I currently have it connected on the 5ghz band. I love how you can see the details on the link quality and status by going to the status page of the device. (see below) Even with the signal strength at 55% my link quality is at 98%.

Extra Info Link is Up

Channel 149 5745000 KHz ; Central Channel: 151

Link Speed Tx 324.0(Mbps) Rx 364.5(Mbps)

Link Quality 98%

Signal Strength 55%

This device was so easy to configure compared to my old DAP-1522 and took me less than 5 minutes to setup. When using my Xbox 360 as a Media Extender to play music and movies from my PC there is no lag at all, if I run the network performance test it list a HDTV quality link between the two so I know this device is working well because with the old device it was listed at a standard TV signal with the occasional spikes in signal loss.

P.S. Make sure you update the firmware on this device from Trendnet's website before you set it up.

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The router only has an internal antenna, and this seems to seriously affect its range. I got a TEW-692GR router at the same time and was only able to establish 450Mbps between the two when they were 2 feet apart. Even 15 feet away, I could only get about 300Mbps, and that's only on the 5GHz band the 2.4GHz band on the router doesn't support full speed with this bridge and the 5GHz band only supports Wireless-A or A/N, not A/G/N. I replaced an existing 8-year-old wireless-G system that connects to an outside office and was unable to connect at anything faster than 54Mbps with this new bridge/router until both were placed in direct-line-of-sight between two windows. If any walls were between devices, speed rarely exceeded 54-95Mbps. Once situated, I can reliably get 160-240Mbps to the router but no more. Doesn't allow USB storage like some competitors, but does have 1Gbps network connections. Functional, but a disappointment.

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