Buffalo Wireless A&G MIMO Broadband Router & AP

Slim and compact, the Buffalo Wireless A&G Performance Broadband Router & Access Point had the most unusual look, with its single antenna sticking up out of its otherwise unobtrusive body. Its appearance doesn’t make much of an impression, it’s not particularly attractive, but it’s so slim that how one could hide it somewhere in a home office.

The setup experience for the Buffalo router was the best of the lot. It was very smooth, although its UI wasn’t very polished. The Buffalo router’s package contents included a slim plug for the power cord and an extra-long patch cable to connect the router to the modem.

The AOSS (AirStation One-Touch Secure System), a feature that allows you to automatically configure a connection to a wireless client is good. You
simply put the router into AOSS mode by pressing the button on top of the router for a few seconds and then activate the AOSS feature on a compatible card. This establishes a secure wireless connection using the best available security that the card and the router mutually support.

The administration interface was another story. Although most routers can save their settings and reboot in seconds, the Buffalo router took significantly longer often taking minutes to save changes and reboot. The UI also limits the administrator’s password to eight characters, which a bit unsecured. Because this limit was undocumented and was enforced without warning , the router effectively truncated passwords longer than 8 characters.

Although the Buffalo router did offer some improvement over the g-class router, it consistently offered the lowest speed of all the comparable routers. Added to that, the Buffalo router doesn’t include support for either WPA2 or VPN, nor does it include support for the other features (such as access controls, email notifications) that are relatively standard on the rest of these routers.