Sitecom WLR-4000 router review

Routers these days... You can purchase a dime a dozen and most of them end up all being the same, as such the more predominant manufacturers continuously seek to add new features to their product in order to differentiate themselves in the market. And that's difficult as there isn't a lot of extras you can do with a router really, you are tied to industry Ethernet and WIFI standards, you can make sure the throughput of the devices is good enough for modern age high-bandwidth file throughput and you can make the firmware as sexy as possible with a nice GUI and extensive feature set.

Sitecom introduces a series of standard routers but with a twist. They tagged their mainstream range X1, X2, X3 and a more enthusiast range X4, X5 and X6. They are all Gigabit models, but obviously the higher the number the better the feature set. All models now come with cloud security, and that's the new feature we'll discuss later on. Here's a small overview of the X4 router we'll put to the test today,

• Automatic Firmware update: automatically get the latest software improvements for free
• 802.11b/g/n Wireless Standard Protocol
• Wireless speed up to 300 Mbps
• 802.3u 802.3i 802.3ab
• Security: WEP 64 & 128 bits, WPA-TKIP, WPA-AES, WPA2, WPA-Radius
• Compatible with Dynamic IP, Static IP, PPPoE, PPTP internet connections
• Three internal antennas
• Quality of Service (QoS)
• Universal Plug & Play (UPnP)
• Application Layer Gateway (ALG)

 But lets focus on the X4, X5 and X6, the complete SKU names for these units are WLR-4000, WLR-5000 en WLR-6000. The first (X4) is single band with a Gigabit switch, the second (X5) comes with dual-band WIFI and then the WLR-6000 also adds the 5 GHz band with a theoretical 450 MBit/sec throughput over WIFI.

SiteCom shipped the X4 model to reviewers so we are already limited in our tests from the get-go being on single band WIFI only.

But have a peek at the product and then let's dive into the review.