Summary: Purchased this for a client who has been having trouble with his cable connection being less-than-reliable. As a backup, we got him DSL service as well, and so I needed an inexpensive dual-WAN router with wireless. I settled on this one. Big mistake. Straight out of the box, the unit ... Expand full review
Summary: Purchased this for a client who has been having trouble with his cable connection being less-than-reliable. As a backup, we got him DSL service as well, and so I needed an inexpensive dual-WAN router with wireless. I settled on this one. Big mistake. Straight out of the box, the unit would *NOT* renew a DHCP on either WAN port. Period. Went to HawkingTech's site to nab the newest firmware, which, as of this posting, was listed at 1.32 (8/15/2005). Upon installing that, it would get an IP!... kind of. It would not pass DNS information from either WAN port, so in order to go anywhere, we had to navigate by IP alone. Sad. Then, it decided to stop doing even *THAT*. OK, a quick call to tech support yielded some Chinese man who insisted that it was a UPnP setting on the router. A setting that does not even exist in the router, let alone a setting that would even marginally correct any of the issues with the unit. 20 minutes into the call, explaining to him exactly what it isn't doing, he magically pulls a 1.44 firmware out of his ass, and emails it to us. What does *THIS* firmware do, you ask? Nothing. Keep in mind that every time we need to get online, the cable or DSL needs to be unplugged and plugged directly to the computer to allow us to access the net. So, upon plugging this back in after the 1.44 firmware flash, imagine how amazed we were to find that -- it's doing the exact same thing. Not renewing the IP from a perfectly-fine WAN link, or not forwarding the DNS information. Now, you may be thinking MAC issues; the modem might not like being changed around so much. Nope. The only advanced configuration option on the router for either connection is the cloning of a MAC address. Which we both did, and didn't do. PPPoE for the DSL is stored in the modem, so that was set as DHCP. There is no 'release' or 'renew' option within the router, in fact, the firmware setup is, honestly, a joke.
Overall, I'd actually give this router a 0 of 10 rating, but cNet does not allow. And, to top off it's abysmal lack of performance, it's ugly. Looks like a troll bridge! The one in the picture above is not the model we got. Though the model numbers are the same, ours was an ugly, curved thing. Do not waste your money on this piece of... yea. Don't waste your money.
