Wireless network performance

First, let's take a look at the apartment that was used in our testing and how it is set up. You can see that the router is placed in the living room. With most wireless routers, the signal strength is not that high in places like the Kitchen and the Medium balcony.

Our testing was done using a fast 1 Gigabit Internet connection that is capable of uploads on the internet of up to 500 Mbps. We used an HP Spectre 13 laptop for all our measurements and several software tools.

To get a better idea of the performance offered by Bitdefender Box 2, we compared it with ASUS Blue Cave and Linksys EA7500 v2. We set up Bitdefender Box 2 as a standalone wireless router to see how it compares to other wireless routers.

We first evaluated the evolution of the signal strength, on the 2.4 GHz wireless band, using an app named inSSIDer. As you can see below, the signal strength delivered by Bitdefender Box 2 was good, except for the room furthest from the router: the Medium balcony.

We then used SpeedTest to measure the speed of the internet connection, on the 2.4 GHz band. As you can see below, the average download speed offered by Bitdefender Box 2 was lower than that of other wireless routers.

The same was true when we looked at the upload speed.

Continuing our measurements on the 2.4 GHz wireless network, we used the PassMark Performance test to transfer data between two computers connected to the network. Bitdefender Box 2 performed reasonably well, but it was slower than its competitors.

The same story was confirmed when we measured the upload speed.

The wireless performance of Bitdefender Box 2 is rather average on the 2.4 GHz band. Other wireless routers tend to outperform it with ease.

For the next set of measurements, we analyzed the performance of the 5GHz wireless frequency. We looked at the evolution of the signal strength, from room to room, with inSSIDer. Except for the Medium balcony and the Kitchen, Bitdefender Box 2 was on par with the wireless routers we compared it to.

Then, we ran SpeedTest to see how fast the internet connection is when using the 5GHz frequency. When we looked at the download speed, Bitdefender Box 2 was massively outperformed by its competitors.

The same was true when we measured the upload speed with SpeedTest.

Lastly, we used the PassMark Performance test to transfer data between two computers connected to the 5GHz wireless network. Bitdefender Box 2 was again much slower than its competitors, which managed to reach high download speeds.

The upload speed for Bitdefender Box 2 was also slower than that of its competitors.

Bitdefender Box 2 offers average performance on the 5 GHz wireless band. Other wireless routers with similar pricing tend to outperform it with ease.

Wired network performance

To test the quality of the wired Ethernet connection, we used a desktop PC equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 1600 processor, running at 3.20GHz, 16GB of RAM and a fast Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD, and a Lenovo IdeaCentre 610s mini PC. Our testing was done using a fast 1 Gigabit Internet connection that is capable of uploads on the internet of up to 500 Mbps.

We measured the speed of the internet connection when using a 1 Gbps Ethernet cable, with SpeedTest. This is the only test we could run on the Bitdefender Box 2 because it has only two Ethernet ports and one of them is used for connecting it to the internet or a wireless router. In this test, Bitdefender Box 2 performed very well and delivered fast transfers that are close to the maximum potential of our internet connection.

Bitdefender Box 2 delivers Ethernet connections that work at speeds that are very close to 1 Gbps.

What is your opinion about Bitdefender Box 2 wireless router?

Now you know our opinion about the Bitdefender Box 2 and how it performed in our testing. If you have any questions about this product, do not hesitate to ask. Also, if you have used Bitdefender Box 2, do share your experience with us, in a comment below.