Buffalo WZR-D1800H 802.11ac router: A few features light, but decent performance

20.09.2012
Buffalo was first to market with both an 802.11ac draft 2.0 router and an 802.11ac draft 2.0 media bridge to go with it. But I imagine that more than a few early adopters are gnashing their teeth over the fact that Buffalo has yet to release a firmware update to improve the pair's performance. The firmware available today is unchanged from when the manufacturer originally shipped the product.

On the upside, the WZR-1800H's current street price ($160) matches that of , and Buffalo's router supports three spatial streams on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency band, whereas Belkin supports only two streams on each band. What's more, Buffalo has been shipping a media bridge since its router launched, while Belkin has to provide reviewers like me with engineering samples and beta firmware.

The WZR-D1800H comes with removable feet than allow it to operate in either a vertical or a horizontal orientation (in the latter case, the feet lift the router up, so that air can flow across both sides of its enclosure. There is no provision for wall-mounting the router. Buffalo built only one USB 2.0 port into the WZR-D1800H, so it can support either network-attached USB storage or a shared USB printer, but not both at the same time.

I didn't try to set up a printer, and I couldn't measure its NAS performance because the router's firmware supports only drives formatted using FAT32 or XFS. High-capacity drives such as the 500MB Western Digital drive that I've been using to benchmark routers come from the factory formatted to use NTFS, and I'm not about to reformat it just so I can plug it into a router. Sorry, Buffalo, but that's a dumb oversight. The decision not to provide a guest network on either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequency bands is even more lame-brained.

On the bright side, the WZR-D1800H provides a DLNA-certified media server, a Samba file server, and an integrated client that can download Torrent files without requiring you to run your PC.

The router came from the factory set to operate on a single 20MHz channel on the 2.4GHz frequency, but it had no problem bonding two channels together to provide 40MHz of bandwidth when I reconfigured its firmware. Even then, its TCP throughput left it languishing near the bottom of most of my charts (except on my close-range test, where it tied with the Belkin AC 1200 DB). The WZR-D1800H was configured for channel bonding on the 5GHz frequency band by default, delivering 80MHz of bandwidth in that spectrum. Here again, however, it finished last or next-to-last on most of my benchmark runs.