Stefan Mileschin

TRENDnet's CES suite had plenty of networking equipment ranging from outdoor long-range access points to industrial switches. It made clear that TRENDnet is focusing more on SMB, particularly in the emerging markets. However, the two announcements at CES were both related to their consumer efforts - one was the TEW-827DRU, a AC2600 MU-MIMO 4x4 802.11ac MU-MIMO router and the other was the TEW-809UB, a AC1900 USB 3.0 WLAN adapter.

The TEW-827DRU is a 4x4 802.11ac Wave2 router with MU-MIMO capabilities using the Qualcomm Atheros IPQ8064 (1.4 GHz dual-core Krait 300 CPUs) + QCA9980 platform. It supports 256-QAM on the 2.4GHz band to deliver 800 Mbps of throughput, while the 5GHz band delivers 1733 Mbps. TRENDnet has licensed Qualcomm's StreamBoost QoS engine for this product in order to bring down latencies for gaming applications. The unit features four Gigabit LAN ports and two USB 3.0 ports. Even though the press release went out at CES, the unit has been available on Amazon for a couple of months now. The press release suggests a retail price of $275, but Amazon already has it on sale at $238.

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