Introduction

SMCWBR14T-G is one of the most feature-packed home broadband router. Besides offering the usual features like WEP, UPNP, SPI firewall etc, it also offers some other interesting features. Let's look at some of the interesting features found in this router.

802.1x

802.1x

I was quite surprised to see this feature as it does not seem practical for this feature to be used in a home based environment. However I'm sure SMC has their reason for putting this feature in.

What is 802.1x?

802.1x is actually a standard to enhance the security of wireless local area networks that follow the IEEE 802.11 standard. It uses the Entensible Authentication Protocol(EAP) that is used for message exchange during the authentication process. This feature is mostly used in enterprise network for better security.

WPA/WPA2

WPA/WPA2

This is a very good feature as it helps to secure your network better. With this enabled, consumers can have less worries of hackers 'listening' into their network. To use this feature, just have the same passkey for both the router and your wireless adapter.

What is WPA/WPA2?

WPA/WPA2 is actually standards to enhance the security of wireless local area networks that follow the IEEE 802.11i standard. WPA is implented to replace WEP as we all know that WEP is easily hackable. WPA uses TKIP (Temporary Key Intergrity Protocol) which addresses the weakness of WEP. However the possibility of finding weakness of WPA is still possible as they still use RC4 encryption algorithm. WPA2 however uses AES (Advanced Encrpytion Standard) which has a more complex encryption mechanism.

SNMP

SNMP Community

SNMP Traps

It felt funny when I first saw this feature. Trying to think of how SNMP can work in a home environment, i gave up after 3 minutes of thinking. I seriously think SNMP is for a big network as SNMP serves to facilitate the exchange of management information between network devices.

What is SNMP?

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is an application layer protocol that allows the exchange of management information between devices. It allows a network administrator to manage network performance, find and solve network problems and to plan for network growth.

The Testing Begins

Test of Signal strength

Test scenario: Downloading of a 20GB file from a Wireless NAS while walking away and back to the router.

>Flooding the Router using linux system.

As we can see from the charts, signal strength started to drop after a 4M distance from the router. However the download speed maintained at a speed of 190kb/s which surprised me.
For the second test scenario, using a linux system, I flooded the router with data and lots of open connections. I was quite surprised that the router could take the torture and did not reboot which is what will typically happen with normal routers.

Conclusion

Overall, I can say that this particular router is suitable for both small office or home usage. The features available may not be that useful for some home users but I'm sure that this router can fit nicely in small offices. Also, this time, SMC has taken a better approach to the designing of their router as we can see the difference when comparing this against older models of SMC products.

Overall Rating : 80 VRMarks!

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