Barricade N ProMax SMCWGBR14-N Wireless Router

The stability is probably the best feature of this router. It's so stable that it is almost boring. For basic network connectivity, it just plain works.

Setup is incredibly easy as well. You could get a basic network connection within five minutes. I however struggled a little bit in the beginning, not because of this router, but because of my Internet provider (Verizon FIOS). I will give a more detailed count for this at the end of this review. For the basic setup, if you follow the proper DHCP lease renewal with your Internet provider (details see below), this router is virtually foolproof. Really, all you need to do is to hook up two ethernet cables, one to the wall and the other to the computer. As usual, it is highly recommended that you log onto the router to change the SSID and security for your wireless network (WLAN).

The speed of this router is comparable to the D-Link DIR-655 which was replaced. The D-Link worked fine for a couple years, but recently became unreliable. Perhaps I am spoiled, I don't find anything so exciting about the speed of this router. But for my purpose, it is plenty fast. So I don't have any complaints either.

The signal strength is excellent. I have this router upstairs. The entire house (a two-story building) gets excellent connection everywhere.

Advanced features like "virtual server" all work as they should.

My biggest complaint about this router is its worse than inadequate design of the web filter and access control. To be fair, most routers don't have a carefully designed Web access control and Web filter. You have the feeling that all these features are added as an afterthought just so that the manufacturer can make a claim. Not carefully programmed at all. The web filter of SMC, however, is without doubt the worst among the bad. The SMC's web filter has just one mode. If the web filter is enabled, it specifically allows individual websites you manually enter, with all other websites blocked. This is such an extreme control mode. I can imagine that some parents wanting tightest possible Web access control may be interested in this mode. But for most common situations, what is more practical is an opposite mode in which all sites are allowed by default except for the ones that are entered by the user to be blocked. The D-Link router DIR-655 has this mode and is therefore better, but even with D-Link, the design is very much inadequate. The whole router has just a single filter. You may set different policies with different schedules, but there's no way to customize the web filters for individual computers. For the manufacturers, having a feature like this is just a matter of programming. They're just not paying attention to such things that are really useful. I guess they've been just busy trying to make these routers work in the first place. With SMC, it does so well in connectivity that you have a sense that the router technology has matured enough to consider other things beyond just making a stable network connection. So it's just a pity that they do such a poor job beyond the basics.

Finally, I'd like to tell you my experience with setting up a wireless router with Verizon FIOS because I think it may save you a lot of trouble. With FIOS (I suspect with many other Internet providers as well), the Internet connection comes with something that they call a "DHCP lease" which is given to a particular router with a specific Mac ID. To switch to a different router, you will have to break the existing lease and get a new DHCP lease. If you don't do this, but just take off your old router and connect the new router, you will not be able to get an Internet connection. After almost 2 hours of struggling, I thought I got a bad sample of the SMC router, and decided to pack it and return it. I'm glad that before I do that, I picked up the phone to call the customer service. Frankly, the Verizon tech support representative was nearly useless. He kept thinking that I was someone who didn't understand how to set up wireless, and kept telling me how to set up the wireless network, which was entirely unrelated to the problem I was facing. I had the feeling that following a scripted procedure to set up wireless network was the only thing he knew how to do. At the end, he just gave up and said the only thing he could do for me was to break my connection and restart it and see what happens. Although he didn't have a clue, that was what actually solved the problem.

Once I realized the problem, I saw that the whole thing could be super easy, because I really didn't need to call the customer service at all. There are several ways to break the existing DHCP lease and get a new one, as follows.

One method is from your PC. To do this, make sure that you have the old router connected first. Go to "start", type in the search box "cmd" and it will give you the DOS window. From there, enter DOS command line: [ ipconfig /release ] (not the brackets). This may not be the easiest way, but it's probably the most accessible way because you don't need to remember how to access your router's management interface from a browser. I actually tried this method before I called, but unfortunately, because I did not realize what the problem was, I tried the IPconfig command with the new router connected. Of course it would not work.

The second method is to log onto the old router's management interface (with the old router connected of course). Most routers have a management interface that provides an option to release DHCP. If your router has that, do that.

The third method is of course to call the customer service.

Regardless of which method you use to get a new DHCP lease, it is extremely important to remember that once the old DHCP is released, you need to disconnect the old router immediately. If you don't do that, the Internet service provider is likely to restart a new DHCP lease with your old router again automatically. This could happen within a minute. So you really need to be doing this very quickly with perfect timing. Strangely enough, no one told me this, and all my struggle came with my lack of this knowledge.

If you follow the right procedure, you really don't need the setup CD that comes with the router. Running the setup CD would have made things much more difficult. Once you break the existing DHCP lease with the old router, and timely connects the new SMC router to establish a new DHCP lease (at least with FIOS, the new DHCP lease is established with the new router automatically and quickly), the Internet connection is set up before you even know. It's that simple.