Design
Billion has never particularly been in the "pretty router" market — a space occupied by models such as Apple's Airport Extreme, Belkin's N1 Vision and Linksys' WRT160N — and while the 7300N makes some cursory attempts at not quite looking like a router with a body encased in white plastic, there's no denying that this is exactly what it is. Then again, in an age of MIMO-compliant routers, there's not much that designers can do about this. No matter what you do, you're still going to end up with equipment that resembles a high-tech hedgehog.
Aside from the 7300N, the box contains everything else you'd expect out of a modem router box — a single Ethernet and RJ11 phone cable, AC adapter, in-line ADSL2+ filter and the product manual on CD, as well as a slim set-up pamphlet.
Features
It's in the feature set that the 7300N hopes to stand out. For a start, it's a draft 2.0 Wireless N 2.4Ghz router with the usual overblown rhetoric of "up to" 300Mbps data rates. It supports the ITU G.992.5 Annex M standard for higher speed uploads, although your ISP will need to support that too for it to be of any use. It supports the usual raft of wireless security standards — WEP, WPA-PSK, and WPA2-PSK, as well as Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) for those with compatible equipment. While it sports the virtually standard four Ethernet ports, it's possible to configure one of them as a WAN port, for connecting an external network (such as via a cable modem).
It is worth noting that if the WAN port and detachable antennas aren't much use to you, you can save yourself a few bucks and pick up the cheaper BiPAC 5200N for AU$189; it has fixed antennas and no WAN port capability.
Performance
Setting up the 7300N was a simple affair, as any PC connected to it will attempt to launch its easy configuration utility automatically once you open up a Web browser. Billion's Web-based configuration utility is on a par with most other Web configuration systems. If you're familiar with them you'll skip through in a minute or so, but if you're a novice and need to change parameters after the initial easy set-up, you're likely to be bamboozled for quite some time. We also found the very blonde smiling woman in the top left corner a bit disconcerting after a while, but that's more of an aesthetic observation than anything else.
Once we'd installed the 7300N, we got to testing its Wireless-N capabilities. As with other Wireless N products, we went in with rather low expectations; while plenty of N products have improved wireless range in certain circumstances, we're yet to see anything near the inflated data claims of manufacturers in our real-world testing scenarios.
| Distance from Router | Billion BiPAC 7300N Signal | Conceptronic 300Mbps Signal | Linksys WRT160N |
| 5m | 75% | 92% | 80% |
| 15m (minor walls) | 59% | 62% | 62% |
| 15m (multiple walls) | 54% | 60% | 50% |
Things didn't look good for the 7300N, which lagged behind its compatriots in pure signal strength terms. This wasn't the entire battle, however, and the 7300N acquitted itself very well indeed in our throughput tests, flinging actual work files between connected PCs.
| Distance between PCs | Billion BiPAC 7300N Throughput | Conceptronic 300Mbps Throughput | Linksys WRT160N Throughput |
| 2m, no barriers | 21Mbps | 15Mbps | 4.88Mbps |
| 20m, multiple walls | 13.3Mbps | 7.7Mbps | 10.12Mbps |
There is an obvious problem with wireless testing, in that it can vary widely depending on your network circumstances, and your results may vary. What our results with the 7300N suggest is that while it's not the best at punching signal through the air, and may struggle in some network congested environments, what signal it does present is quite consistent and, relative to other 300Mbps Wireless-N equipment, fairly speedy.
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