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If your branch office is overloading your dial-up routers, or you simply want to connect a branch office site at minimal cost, ISDN, with its higher, more reliable bandwidth, could be the answer. The options are plentiful, so we decided to test products that fall in the $1,500 range. Generally, on this low end, features can be scarce, but we didn't find this always held true.
The deciding factors are data compression, routed protocols, spoofed protocols and destination profiles that let the routers call multiple sites, with many configurable call characteristics. Ascend's Pipeline 50 and Symplex's DirectRoute RO-1 bring some truly useful features at a price that won't kill the bottom line. Symplex and Ascend also offer central office routers with more ports to reduce hardware investment. Requiring less than a half day of configuration time, the remote site routers will route IP (Symplex routes IPX as well) over one or two B channels, with the ability to change on demand. Ascend offers Stac compression, which fared better in our testing than DirectRoute's proprietary compression.
Telebit's NetBlazer LS ISDN has all the components of a great router, yet, it isn't well implemented. It routes IP, IPX and AppleTalk, which is more than any other vendor, and while it supports Stac compression, IPX traffic ran a bit slower than we expected, mostly due to routing overhead. KNX's SIL-NLM, a card that goes in your NetWare server, is very flexible and easy to configure. It also offers a proprietary data link protocol that successfully spoofed more protocols than any other product we tested. Compared with the other products, KNX's decidedly NetWare orientation limits its market appeal.
Ascend Pipeline 50
The Pipeline 50's price pushes our $1,500 ceiling, but accurately reflects Pipeline's extra features and configurability. For instance, you get excellent destination profiles, with the ability to tweak any connection variable you could ever want. Moreover, Pipeline's compression numbers put it at the top of the lot for routing throughput.
This small office router is a simple network box that connects via ISDN to a similar box on the corporate LAN. Ascend's IP-only routing is unfortunate, but it can also spoof IPX, even though it only bridges that protocol. While the Pipeline doesn't spoof IP, it uses...