Buffalo WZR-1750DHP 802.11ac Wi-Fi router review: Respectable feature set, mediocre performance

Buffalo was first to market with an 802.11ac router, and for a time it was the only manufacturer shipping an 802.11ac client bridge. The WZR-1750DHP is the company's second effort, but it’s not very exciting. Its performance and feature set left it in fifth place in this six-router roundup.

As its name indicates, this is a dual-band router delivering throughput up to 450 mbps on its 2.4- and 5GHz 802.11n networks, and up to 1300 mbps on its 5GHz 802.11ac network. As it did with its first effort, Buffalo trapped the three antennas inside the router's enclosure. As you’ll see in the performance benchmarks, its range suffered accordingly.

ROBERT CARDIN

The WZR-1750DHP has one USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 port and can support both shared USB storage and a shared USB printer. But since it doesn’t support drives formatted NTFS, I didn’t measure its NAS performance. This router has most of the same business-oriented features as the Asus RT-AC68U, including VPN, FTP, and SAMBA servers, but it doesn’t support WAN bridging or the ability to connect a 3G/4G mobile broadband dongle to its USB port as the Asus RT-AC68U does.

On the consumer side, Buffalo included UPnP and DLNA media servers, but not an iTunes server. An integrated BitTorrent client means you can download torrents to an attached hard drive without tying up a PC on your network. The WZR-1750DHP’s Quality of Service (QoS) feature allows you to assign priority to video streaming, VoIP, gaming, audio streaming, web-browsing, or file downloads. You can tweak the values for each of these settings or create your own custom rules.

The WZR-1750DHP’s parental controls, via Symantec’s Norton ConnectSafe web-filtering service, are better than average. But nothing I’ve seen compares to PowerCloud’s Skydog (unfortunately, that router is limited to the 802.11n standard).

ROBERT CARDIN

Wireless networking performance

You can configure the WZR-1750DHP to operate as a router, a wireless access point, or a wireless client bridge. It doesn’t offer TurboQAM on its 802.11n network, but I don’t see that as a major shortcoming since the client also must support that technology, and relatively few devices do.

Each of the routers delivered high TCP throughput when paired with an identical router configured as an 802.11ac wireless bridge, but the WZR-1750DHP finished next to last at most locations in this scenario.

The WZR-1750DHP’s performance flipped when I paired it with a Linksys WUMC710 802.11ac wireless bridge. It finished dead last in the two closer-range tests, but it performed very well when the client was in my home theater and in my home office.

When paired with a Linksys WUSB6300 802.11ac client adapter, Buffalo’s router finished in third place at close range, but it surprised me with a last-place finish when the client was in the kitchen, just 20 feet from the router. Its long-range performance—with the client in my home office—was equally poor. 

Buffalo’s router turned in a good performance as a 5GHz 802.11n router, at least at close range. It took a strong first-place finish when the client was 9 feet from the router with no walls separating the two. Here again, however, its performance dropped off rapidly with distance.

The WZR-1750DHP turned in fairly good performances running a 2.4 802.11n network, but it had a difficult time reaching the client when the client was in my home theater.

The WZR-1750DHP doesn't support hard drives formatted NTFS, so I didn't measure its performance reading and writing files from and to an attached hard drive, because the drive I use for this test is formatted NTFS. Buffalo's was the only router with this limitation.  (Trendnet's TEW-812DRU V2 supports NTFS drives, but it wouldn't recognize the drive I used for testing, so I didn't evaluate its performance on this metric either.)

The bottom line

As an 802.11ac router, Buffalo’s WZR-1750DHP is plenty fast enough to stream HD video to just about any room in your home. Its feature set is strong, and its parental controls are much better than average. But if you’re looking for the fastest 802.11ac router, this one clearly isn’t in the running. The absence of support for USB hard drives formatted NTFS renders it a weak NAS solution.

After you've finished reading the rest of these reviews, check out 12 of the new routers announced at CES 2014.