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Introduction

The 5 Contestants

Now that high speed or broadband internet is being made available in more and more areas, people are beginning to jump onto the next wave of internet access with super high speed throughputs and ultra low latency and ping times. Because most households that have a computer tend to have more than one computer, home networking has also jumped up significantly in the last two years. These two explosions go hand in hand today, since high speed internet is perfect for sharing with multiple computers in the household or small office. Thus was born the first internet broadband gateway products, which were hardware firewall/NAT solutions meant to replace the restrictive software proxy and NAT solutions such as WinGate, WinProxy, and Sygate. These initial products tended to have either only one LAN port, or were equipped only with 10mb built in hubs. Today, we look at the newest generation of internet gateways… Broadband Routers with built in 10/100 dual speed hubs.

We gathered a total of 5 major players currently out with products qualifying for our roundup and put their products head to head in a total Router shootout. To qualify for the roundup, the broadband routers must have built in 4 port 10/100 dual speed hubs, and we easily found at least 9 major products that fit the bill. In this article, we cover 5 of the routers that we could get our hands on first. Other major companies like Netgear, SMC, and ZyXel are amongst those that have products not covered in this roundup, but fear not, because even as this article goes to print, we’re already working on getting those products in for a second round. Unfortunately, network giants like 3Com and Intel do NOT have comparable products at this time, so we couldn’t include anything from them. In fact, they don’t even have older generation broadband gateways (with single port or 10MB integrated hubs).

Candidate Overview

Each of the five candidates in this roundup has some very common features – in fact some of these features are standard among internet routers. First is the ubiquitous built-in DHCP server. All the routers that you will buy have this feature. It essentially eliminates the hassle of setting up the IP and Gateway information for each of your clients. The DHCP servers in the routers also let you choose which IP to start allocating, and also let you control the upper range of IPs to allow. So for instance you can start your IPs at X.X.X.100 and end it at X.X.X.253, which then leaves the first 100 IPs free for you to assign to specialized computers which may have need of static IPs (for example, your webserver, your FTP server, mail server, Quake server, network printers, etc).

The routers also act as DHCP clients on the WAN port, which allows them to self configure if your DSL or cable provider uses a DHCP server for configuration of its customer modems. Because these devices function like true routers, DSL users are able to plug directly from their DSL line straight into the WAN port. Cable users will still need a “modem”, however.

Those who may not be familiar with this breed of broadband gateway routers will also be interested to note that configuration and administration is done strictly through a browser based system. Also, all of the devices have instant update capabilities that allow you to change settings without having to “restart” the routers. All of this makes for a very quick and painless setup, plus also enables easy administration.

Finally we have the DMZ, or DeMilitarized Zone. The DMZ is a single IP which has full incoming and outgoing access through all its ports. This is a risky sort of feature, but it is necessary for some troublesome games or programs. I found I didn’t have the need to open up any computer to the net, so this is more of a specialized feature for rare cases where a game or software requires some unusual port accesses.

Advanced features like detailed access controls and port filters allow you to control what is going on in your network. These will also allow you to limit internet access to specific computers if you so wish. Each of the routers has a slightly different approach to these advanced features, and what suits you best is all dependent on the scale and focus of your application.

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