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As the number of households and small businesses with high-speed Internet connections grows, so does the need for multipurpose gateway devices. A typical gateway device provides all of the functions of a hub or switch and a router in a single box. It also offers some measure of firewall protection and isolation for the computers that will use the device to connect to the Internet.
We recently tested seven residential gateway devices to see which products offer the best overall solution for the task. Products tested included the Cayman WE-H-W; D-Link DI-713P; Linksys BEFW11S4; Netgear MR314; SMC SMC7004ABR Barricade; MaxGate UGate-3200P; and Macsense Xrouter Aero. Four of the products we tested (D-Link DI-713P,Linksys BEFW11S4, Netgear MR314 and Macsense Xrouter Aero) also offer wireless network all points, although we did not specifically tes 'A those features.
Calling a clear winner out of the seven contenders was not an easy task. All prod-- ucts offer a basic set of features and provide reasonably comparable performance.The SMC7004ABR Barricade barely edged out the Netgear MR314, winning out Blue Ribbon Award. Both products offer a number of features that the others don't, including extra firewall protection, e-mail notification of event! and extra management capabilities.The SMC7004ABR Barricade looks even more attractive when you see its price is between half to a quarter of the competition.
* Performance
We looked at performance from two perspectives.We first wanted to see how each product handled the situation in which one workstation was transferring a large file and another workstation attempted to access a Web site.We also looked at the transfer rate between two workstations connected to the gateway and between a workstation and a server on another network. For the server transfer speed tests we connected the WAN port on each gateway to another switch that had a single Windows 2000 server on it.
In the first case, all the products were essentially even in handling the data transfer and Web site access problem. For the second case we timed how long it took to transfer files between two workstations connected to the router/switch and to a server connected through the WAN port to another 10/100 switch.While the workstation-to-workstation numbers were relatively even, the workstation-to-server numbers varied.The Cayman and Macsense products were neck...