Currently, I have to give a neutral recommendation on this product. While the wireless
aspect of the unit has worked flawlessly for me the entire time I've had it, I've had to send the unit back
twice because of problems with the auxillary ports. If you don't need the auxillary ports, get one of the cheaper SMC
units with the same wireless support.
We purchased this unit in January of 2001. We initially tried to connect our printer up to it, but we had so
much trouble with half printed pages that we eventually put the printer back upstairs. Calls to customer support
gave some suggestions, but no fixes.
Eventually, I hooked up a modem instead, and used it to dial into work via the wireless connection and a custom
route added to my Windows 2000 laptop. The connections were sporadic. With the first unit I had, the second attempt
to connect using the modem would hang the auxillary port of the device, and would require a power cycle to clear.
The second unit would have the same lockup, but randomly rather than every second attempt. We never attempted
to connect a printer to the second unit.
To it's credit, the wireless router would always continue to function when the auxillary port crashed!
The throughput of the wireless connection is good, averaging about 4MBps. The built in 100MBps wired switch, however, is
one of the slowest I've ever seen, transmitting only 23MBps compared to my Linksys' 78 MBps.
I purchased this unit along with two SMC wireless PC cards for our laptops. The base unit is placed in the common
room of our house to provide the best connection in the place we spend most of our time. The transmission is
good enough that we can move around our house and still stay connection, and I can even go into the backyard and garage
and still get data (although if I stand behind the metal garage door, I lose the connection, obviouslly).
If all you want to use the unit for is the wireless capability, this seems to be a good unit. But if that's
all you want, get a cheaper unit without the auxillary port. If you want to use the auxillary support, I have to
recommend against this unit, at least until they get the bugs worked out.
For additional reviews, see Practically Networked.
Update Nov. 2001
The dialup problems which hung the auxillary port (the config screen, the modem, and the printer), were caused by the type of
dialup connection I had. For some reason, the dialup device is not compatible with MSCHAP2, and trying to connect to this type of network
authentication will hand the device. I never could find out from SMC why their engineers could not fix the MSCHAP2 support, but it seems they
simply are not able!
Update Feb. 2002
Tried the printer port again; still no luck. The device loses print jobs, and reports that every print job has been killed. Of
the print jobs that it actually does send to the printer, all are now corrupt, and get printed as randomly colored characters, twenty to fifty per page.
I'm up to running version 1.94b of the Barricade firmware, and still no luck. I'm trying to use it with an Epson Stylus Color 600, and SMC's
web site says I may need to make a change in the "Epson Printer Manager", but there is no such product for Windows 2000 or XP, so I guess
we're out of luck.
Update Mar. 2002
Customer support finally responded to me after about 4 weeks regarding the print server not working. Too late, I've already stopped using the Barricade. I switched to a D-Link DP-313, which has worked almost flawlessly since I plugged it in.
Aside from WEP resetting itself over and over, the wireless portion has been working fine, and I'm happy with that. But the WEP and the print server are unusable.
This file last modified 03/09/02
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