The idea of having both bands available at the same time means that a single gateway can handle your newer systems that are streaming media using 5GHz-such as an Apple TV or a computer that’s playing music and video over a Wi-Fi network-and older computers that handle more mundane tasks, or that can’t be upgraded to use 802.11n in the 5GHz band. A button in the middle of the icons lets you connect computers without entering an encryption password. Illuminable icons on top of the case show whether the device is currently connected to the Internet, whether the Wi-Fi network is active, and which of the four 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports are in use.

The WRT610N was redesigned to hide antennas, so it’s sleek and attractive. While the gateway’s core features work well, and it’s vastly improved over the previous model, its Mac OS X support falls short. This allows 802.11b, g, and n over 2.4GHz, and 802.11a and n over 5GHz.

Unlike Apple’s Wi-Fi base stations with Draft N (802.11n) support, which can be set to use either frequency band, the Linksys WRT610N pushes data over both Wi-Fi spectrum slices at the same time. The Linksys WRT610N router takes advantage of modern Wi-Fi standards by creating two networks at once: a high-frequency, high-speed 5GHz network for media, which happens to work with the Apple TV, and a slower backward-compatible 2.4GHz network for older devices and slower data transfers. Mac users want to stream and sync video and play networked games without getting bogged down by lagging data.

Linksys wireless router for mac