Powerline routers

Sometimes a piece of kit looks as if it is targeted squarely at home and even leisure use. However this shouldn't put you off considering it as a solution to a difficult or unusual enterprise-class problem.

A good example of this is powerline networking. This was conceived to be easy to use in the home and in its AV form was designed to be fast enough to transmit multimedia feeds to any room in the house. Of course anything that fast has to have other uses and what could be better than a router that supports ADSL, LAN, WiFi and powerline networking in one box.

The ZyXEL P660HWP can do all of this and it has a full featured router operating system that lets you configure a surprising amount of sophisticated security and operational modes. At the other end of the spectrum almost we have the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 which is a remarkably small WiFi WAN router that looks almost like a toy but you can use it to make connections between remote networks and as a backup router via cable or ADSL.

Other routers in this month's labs:

Fast WiFi routers

Robust routers