This post was written by Jason Stella
SMC moves away from the chunky Barricade-g boxes to a slimmed down and extremely lightweight silver plastic chassis with Barricade N Broadband Router. A useful feature is the small switch at the rear which allows you to physically disable the wireless access point. No installation utilities are provided but none are needed as the router’s management interface provides plenty of wizard-based assistance. For router security features there’s little between SMC and D-Link’s DIR-655 but the latter’s Gigabit ports make it look a far better deal – especially as it only costs a few pounds more.
Belkin’s sleek little Network USB Hub is rather special in that it enables you to share virtually any type of USB device over the network with multiple PCs. The hub adheres to Belkin’s design philosophy so its polished black casing will fit in neatly with its latest wireless routers. Belkin delivers a simple solution for sharing your USB devices over the network. It’s extremely easy to use with good management and monitoring tools but overall performance for USB storage devices is a disappointment.
Netopia R9100 Broadband Router has features that are a bit dated. Too quirky for a new user to easily configure out of the box and probably not the first choice of many ISP’s to deploy Pretty easy to configure if you know what your are doing and someone tells you what to bunch in the “Easy Setup”. The Menus are a good start; they just need a bit more organizing to make them more functional. Good performance, except sometimes the dial on demand doesn’t always work.
Kyocera KR2 is a portable Wi-Fi router that lets you share a cellular broadband connection from Verizon Wireless and Sprint (S) with a group. The biggest improvement with the KR2 may be the switch to the 802.11n flavor of Wi-Fi, which carries the wireless signal farther than the 802.11g transmitter in the KR1. The market for the KR2 isn’t huge. Many mobile professionals can make do with Wi-Fi or a solo cellular data account. But it’s a great option for those who want to set up a quick network or share access.
Cisco 851W Integrated Services router is one of the best routers to use; throughout its usage. It dissipates packets faster than you can think of. However, a whole lot should be said about restarting routers, it has been a routine since have known something about networking, this particular router is not exempted but its own is quite manageable. Nevertheless, configuring a Cisco router, you need a Cisco specialty to do that compared to other routers in the market. All in all, Cisco routers are still the best, although expensive.
McAfee network-access control has a strong foundation in the breadth of security checks and a mature endpoint-security management platform, but it lacks some standard NAC capabilities, such as a captive portal for guest users, the ability to authenticate users against external repositories and the option of creating custom endpoint checks. It does not support direct integration for external authentication, but relies on the authentication information on the endpoint accessed by the agent software. In its current iteration, this product would be a good fit for those looking for an easy introduction to NAC.