The Adapter

The TEW-654TR is a tiny thing for a router. It easily fits in the palm of your hand and could even be put in a pocket without too much trouble. It measures only 0.73" high x 3.15" wide x 2.36" in length. This makes it one of the smaller types of these devices on the market.

The front of the TEW-654TR is sloped in order to maintain its slim appearance. There are three LEDs that let you know what is going on with it at any time. These indicate Power, LAN and WLAN. TRENDnet has kept things pretty simple here.

The back is where we find all of the ports (power and RJ-45). There is also a button for Wireless Protected Setup. This is a nice feature that I have never used in a real network. To me there is just something about setting things up manually that I prefer. There is also a reset button here just in case you need to clear all of the settings on your TEW-654TR.

Now, something to note back here, The RJ-45 port is a 10/100 port. This means that even if you are connected at the maximum speed that 802.11n can offer (150Mbps) you will only ever get 100Mbps through the TEW-654TR. I hope in future revisions they can upgrade this to a 1Gbps adapter and offer the full transmission speed of the 802.11n wireless.

*A note on the reset button; using this only resets the settings for the current operation mode. To clear all of them you have to change modes and press the reset button on each one.

Flipping the TEW-654TR over, we find a very important switch. This allows you to change the operational mode of the TEW-654TR. You can set it to AP (Access Point), Client, or RT (Router). Each of these is pretty self-explanatory and will be covered in more detail in the setup and performance sections.