Product Overview
Buffalo has been doing a better job of late with the industrial design of its products, particularly in its NASes. But a different team of designers must have been assigned to the "AG". With its cabled antenna puck and homely silver/grey plastic enclosure, it's not a particularly elegant product; and even less so when arranged in its vertical mode (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The AG standing up
The front panel has the usual assortment of status lights as you can see in Figure 2 below. Note that Buffalo has done away with the blue LED indication of a gigabit Ethernet connection, judging it to be too bright. So you'll have to depend on your computer to tell you the negotiated link speed.
Figure 2: Front Panel
Connectors on the rear panel (Figure 3) include four 10/100/1000 LAN ports, one 10/100/1000 WAN port and power jack. All ports are auto MDI / MDI-X which means they'll figure out how to connect to whatever you plug into them. There's also a reset-to-factory-defaults switch and a switch to make the AG function as an Access Point. The array of three antennas is hard-wired to the back of the router, although they terminate in miniature connectors on the two radio modules inside.
Figure 3: Rear Panel
Like the D-Link DIR-655 that currently tops our router performance charts, the AG has both gigabit LAN and WAN ports. But as you'll see later, the AG doesn't have comparable routing performance.