Hawking PN9249 Broadband Cable/DSL Router

Rating:
Summary: Rated 4, but the rest are <3
Review: That's right. This is the only router/4pt switch in it's class that has a 10/100 WAN port. Netgear, Linksys, Belkin, etc. are all 10baseT WAN. The NAT for port forwarding for an FTP site actually works! Haven't tried it too much with anything else. For games that use a LOT of ports like Mechwarrior 4, you need to jump into the DMZ. But I know Netgear and Linksys users that have to put their FTP servers in the DMZ. Down side is that only 16 TCP or UDP ports can be forwarded, where I think Netgear's funny looking new silver one (what was so wrong with square blue metal? You could set that on it's edge WITHOUT the silly stand) does 20, but NONE of them allow you to enter, say, a range of 100 ports for subsequent connections in games. For that I guess you need a REAL router like a Cisco and a lot more money. The best part is the price. With Super Saver shipping to Hawaii, I got WAY over on the usual "Pony Express" charge-by-weight price gouging, as well as the local merchant price gouging,(as if they really pay individual shipping rates on bulk products)if they even carry a selection. This router is cheaper than the competitors and better in most areas, although ALL these companies could still do a better job with NAT reliability, command line interfaces and port range capability. The CPU is an ARM 7 125Mhz with an 8MB Cache. You won't find these specs anywhere, though. I had to dig. Why are these companies so tight-lipped about # of ports you can forward and proc/cache specs? Well, cuz they want to sell volume and most folks don't even know what this stuff means. None of the companies are interested in establishing any standard of baseline comparison, because they'd rather market by taking up space on the store shelf like beer companies do. This little router does have nice bright green LED's on the front for each speed, which makes monitoring traffic easy. Small, light and stackable with OTHER rectangular components besides Hawking products, unlike Linksys and (newest)Netgear. This black router just looks more professional to me than a lot of the other funky-colored home-user market niche types. Don't know too much about it's electrical durability yet, but after all the Linksys products (hubs, mostly) that I've seen get fried by power spikes, I steered clear. Bottom line is that this router is yet another sleeper computer/networking product that most folks in the market for a router will overlook.