Glue together two broadband links to make fat pipe

---

Company: EDIMAX Technology Co.
Web Site: www.edimax.com
Average Price: $200

---

"If you're really serious about high speed internet connections, contact your local phone company about installing a high speed digital line. These lines can cost you plenty ... think of thousands of dollars (...) a T1 line has a connection speed of up to 1.544 Mbps.""Networking for Dummies.", 4th Ed.

A (not) brief Introduction to Dual WAN routers
You probably would love to have a T1 or T3 at home, but more often than not, it's hard to justify the luxury. While in some places residential DSL service has reached T1 speeds, in too many others - like mine - residential Cable modem, ADSL and even fixed wireless services offer less-than-T1 speeds. In my home city/country, for instance, providers of all three available broadband service types (cable, DSL, fixed wireless) seem to have conspired to offer 512 Kbps as the fastest speed. I could rant about the price too, suffice to say we pay the same price for 256 Kbps for which a subscriber can get 1.5 Mbits ADSL in the U.S.

Even if you're lucky and you live in advanced societies with Internet-friendly Telcos and governments where broadband is not only inexpensive and ubiquitous but also fast - Korea, Japan, Sweden, Norway come to mind-, wouldn't it be nice to join your two japanese 45 Mbps DSL accounts into a single, combined data pipe?

A new range of affordable broadband routers now make T1 speeds and beyond available to anyone who can afford it - even if the broadband offerings are limited in speed. These routers have the ability to "join" two broadband links - xDSL, Cable modem, Fixed Wireless, you name it - into a single seamless "big data pipe" shared by all the machines in your LAN. The devices don't even have to be of the same type, as any pair of broadband connections with Ethernet (RJ45) connectivity can be used, and even mixed for additional safety against service outages from a particular (Telco or Cable) infrastructure.

While you won't be able to use the combined bandwidth with a single file download, any applications using multiple simultaneous connections will. The scenarios are many; you can use the combined bandwidth even if you have only one PC behind the router doing multiple downloads -when downloading a web page with graphics for example, when you use a "download accelerator", when you manually start downloading multiple files at once, or when you use a peer-to-peer file sharing program. Of course, if there are multiple machines behind the router accessing the internet at once, the benefits are obvious.

This type of linking of two connections into one is often referred to as "Multi-Homing" and also "connection teaming", it is different from "bridging" where it would require some work on the ISP side to split a single IP address connection between two physical links.

The First Review: Edimax In this first article of the series reviewing "Dual WAN" routers, it is now time to test Edimax's offering, the BR6524 Dual WAN Router.

For the test I decided to add ADSL service to my secondary phone line, which until now only had a sleeping Panasonic fax machine dinosaur connected to it. After the usual delays and fighting the local Italian-owned incumbent telco -who keeps a monopoly on the local loop, by the way-, I got DSL service up and running. I requested their maximum speed offering: 512 Kbps ADSL service (wow! - not), so I could add that extra bandwidth to my existing 256 Kbps link, for a nice 768 Kbps of total downstream speed, or about half what U.S. customers can get on a single link. .

Yes, a pair of 512 Kbps ADSL links teamed into one 1 Mbit pipe would have been better, but my budget as a writer doesn't allow such expenses. This test scenario also serves as proof that the broadband connections that you plug into the router's WAN ports can be of radically different speeds.

Outside the Box
The BR6524 comes in a neat and small box. Because the unit is tiny and beautiful! It shows that whoever designed it had the home or home office market in mind, as it doesn't have the "industrial" look one would expect from networking gear: light and dark gray glossy plastic with a round finish.

Inside the box you will find the device, a beautiful 28-page user's manual on glossy paper that's one of the best I've seen in a long time and a small wall-type 110v AC to 9V (0.5A) transformer. There are mounting accessories in there, allowing you to "hang" the unit vertically on a wall. The only problem, if one can call that one, is that due to its shape, you can't stack the unit along with your other metal boxed routers and switches with square edges. Unless you place the Edimax on top.

The unit's power consumption is low (0.5A vs 1A for other similar devices) and hence the device operates 24/7 without even getting warm (or extremely hot, like my Arescom NetDSL 800 DSL router).

All RJ-45 ethernet connectors, 4 for your LAN, and one for each "WAN" broadband connection, are in the back, along with one tiny reset button of the use-a-paperclip or pen to press it kind. No DIP switches or other connections are necessary because everything can be configured over tcp/ip. On the front there is one power plus one LED for each ethernet connector. On each port, a correct link is indicated by a lit LED, and activity is indicated by blinking. Simple!

The documentation on the printed manual is good, with screenshots, schematics, and even setup instructions for Windows NT/2000 and XP's TCP/IP in case you're installing networking support on each PC you're connecting to the device. No Linux info is included, however. Last comment about the manual: the green activist in me would like to see it printed on recycled paper. Aren't you tired of reading me saying this?

Finally, no Ethernet cables are included. I don't find that a serious lack, as anyone building a LAN or with one in place already has Ethernet wiring, and most DSL routers and cable modems come with their own single cable.

Standard Rant
First complain to all home networking device manufacturers, not just Edimax: would it be too much to ask for Ethernet connections at the front or the sides? What about a tiny power on/off switch? Or if you insist on placing the connectors in the back, wouldn't it be possible to properly mark each connector's location and describe each in a readable font at the top, or with a tiny little arrow?. This would allow users to plug and unplug cables with ease without having to struggle with the -always short - LAN wires plugged to lift the unit.

I do not blame Edimax, they're just following the rest of the industry. But this insanity must be stopped. Enough ranting. As always, you can click on the link at the end of this article for plenty of review pictures and screenshots plus last-minute comments, hosted on my site.

Inside the Box
The hacker in me couldn't resist opening the unit (there are only four tiny screws to remove) and it revealed a highly packed single-sided circuit board with surface mount components, with an amazing level of integration. Almost all the brains of this device is squeezed into a single big chip: a Conexant Network Processor CX8420, then there is one 4 Mbit flash memory (which holds the firmware), one DRAM chip (for obvious use), and that's it. The rest are all passive components. Amazing!

Now that the electronics-loving geeks like me are happy, it's time to put everything together and start the review...

Installation

I connected my Arescom 800 DSL modem/router to the primary broadband port (WAN1), connected my Cisco 677 to the WAN2 port, and plugged my four PCs to the LAN ports, then plugged the power adaptor. That's it.

The whole installation and configuration process took about five minutes, and my two ADSL connections were active.

Beauty is (also) inside
If you have configured any other "broadband router" you will feel at home with the Edimax: everything is setup by pointing a web browser to the router's default IP address: 192.168.2.1 (notice this is different from the 192.168.ZERO.1 often used as the default address by other routers and devices).

Of course, you can change the unit's internal IP address to anything you like (I personally prefer to use the more flexible 10.x.y.z private IP range). In case you later to reset the device to the factory default ip address, just press the reset button in the back with a pen tip for more than four seconds.

The configuration was done from my OS/2 system using Mozilla 1.5, just to highlight the platform-independent nature of the whole process. It was just an easy "fill-in-the-blanks" excercise, thanks to the very well designed HTML setup screens, which include brief explanations of each configuration field, along with a description of every setup screen. Everything else you need to know is described in the printed manual.

And for the beginners, a "quick setup" link on the router's default page walks you through a series of pages, setting up the basic functions to get your router connected and running with "Next Page" and "Back" buttons at the bottom of each configuration screen that lets you go back and correct mistakes or move forward with the setup process until completed. Piece of cake!

A final idea for the manufacturer: it would be a nice and inexpensive touch to stick a small sticker in the back of the unit, showing its default IP address, for lazy people like me who start connecting the unit before even RTFM .

If size does matter, a dual data pipe pipe doubles the fun!

Once the router was configured and working, I was able to experience the increased bandwidth. Basically, it works. When you start multiple downloads bandwidth effectively reaches the sum of the two links, and even for simple browsing the speed increase was noticeable.

Multiple simultaneous FTP and HTTP file transfers were launched using GNU wget, a web and FTP file retrieval tool, which is handy because every transfer shows an accurate Kbytes/sec speed indicator updated regularly, and second, because of the program's low-overhead nature, being a small command line utility with no GUI or graphical indicators.

The tests were launched from systems behind the router, running IBM OS/2 (Dual PIII 600 Mhz), Windows 2000 SP4 (2.4 Ghz P4), SUSE 9.0 Pro (Thinkpad T40, Mobile P4 1.5Ghz), and LindowsOS 4.0 (Compaq Armada E500, 800Mhz PIII), and the results were similar, with no problems encountered at all. The NAT proxy and firewall works as well as any other single-WAN router I have tried (the BEFSRxxx Linksys models), and URL blocking working as designed I expected the router to use DNS tricks returning some internal IP instead of the real address, but it actually blocks the TCP connection, resulting in an "unable to reach host" message.

For every day use you might want to get a graphical "download accelerator" for your operating system of choice, there are a handful for Windows and one for Linux, that I know of, many of which can allow you to speed up the transfer of a single file, by making multiple connections to the same server, and requesting different "byte ranges" from the sever. Some even have the ability to search for the same file on different servers, getting better throughput and being a good citizen, respecting the site owners at the same time.

The Good
1. The hardware design is great, not good. If you're looking for a sturdy metal case that you can stack between a pile of routers or switches, look elsewhere.

2. The unit supports every TCP/IP connection method to an ISP known to mankind: DHCP (used by 1st-generation cable modems), Fixed IP (frequently used by fixed-wireless and some xDSL), PPPoE (used by most xDSL providers these days and even some cable modem providers), and finally PPTP connection to your ISP (used in Europe).

3. The QOS (Quality of Service) feature is great. Finally you can type on your remote SSH or telnet session -or send e-mails- without feeling like you are on a 1200 bps modem when there are several massive downloads going on at the same time.

4. The "schedule rules", together with the Access Control rules and the URL filtering feature will make the evil Gestapo sys-admins inside every one of you smiling with sadistic glee. You can have rules apply on certain days, on certain hours, you name it! Peer to Peer traffic from your young son, on week days, at night? Set a rule with those parameters as "blocked". The result? No porn for you!. (read in Seinfeld's Soup-Nazi tone).

5. The "special applications" feature is a hidden jewel. Basically it allows you to set rules by which an outgoing connection on a certain port automatically enables forwarding of inbound traffic to certain port(s) to a given IP address in your internal LAN.

Want an example of a real-world scenario for this? I use "Deltathree", a propietary IP-to-Phone voice over IP application. This windows program creates outgoing TCP connections via ports# 12053, 12122 and 12083, but also needs ports 12120-12122 and 24150 to 24181 (31 ports) for UPD transmission and reception.

With any other "regular router" like my old Linksys ones, I had to leave there port ranges permanently routed to the internal IP address of the machine that has this program installed. With this feature, however, I can set a rule by which when the unit detects an outgoing connection to port 12053, all other "port windows" are inmediately routed automatically.

There is a big difference between having the port ranges "open" permanently with the old approach vs. having certain port ranges "open dynamically" for use when needed by a certain application.

6. Another lovely feature is what Edimax calls "Address Mapping" letting you force a single IP or an entire IP range from your local LAN to use either the primary or secondary broadband links. So you can assign the slower (or faster) broadband link (if any) to a particular machine or group of machines, leaving these without "teaming".

If you're looking for an easy-to-setup unit that can join two broadband links to double your downloading pleasure, this is it.

The Bad
1. Why use frames on the HTML setup screens? Linksys has proved that you can design great tabbed interfaces without messing with frames...

2. If I could, I'd redesign the QOS feature and its setup screen. I would prefer two simple screens grouping rules per IP address and per service. For example: "machine at [192.168.5.2] has traffic shaped at [56] kbps" or "always allocate a minimum of [ 5 ] kbps for port [ 110 ] traffic".

3. Adding an RS232 port to connect a dial-up modem as a backup link would make this the perfect router.

. 4. By default, the unit refuses a login to the router's administration web page if you were recently logged in from other private ip address. This is annoying. "This unit is being administered from IP 192.168.x.y!" is not what I want to read when I switch PCs and want to access MY router, on my lan, after all.

The Ugly
1. Why password-protect the "status" screen?. The Internet Connection Status screen could as well be displayed, without the "disconnect/reconnect" buttons, as the initial screen when one types the unit's IP address. Asking for the login information should only be done when one wants to actually change data or disconnect, IMHO.

Please, Edimax, make this little change. If I have several machines sharing my dual broadband link, I'd love being able to tell anyone using the service that they can check the status of the link by entering the IP in their browser, without fears of they messing up with my router or changing the configuration.

I really, really tried hard to find more things to hate on this unit, so I wouldn't look as the average "wh#re reviewer" you can find on other sites. But I couldn't find any. I tried downloading large files from the Gnutella peer to peer network -for educational and testing purposes only!- , ssh, ICQ, AIM, IMAP, secure imap, establishing a PPTP connection from my notebook behind the router to a PPTP server on the public internet (my old Linksys BEFSR11 sometimes acted up with PPTP), it worked.

Isn't it a real pity when everything just works?

The Score
Features: 4/5 (almost perfect)
Documentation: 4/5
Support: 4/5
Hardware design: 5/5

The Verdict
It is hard to dislike a device that not only delivers what it promises, works flawlessly where others fail, and includes some extra gems in there without fanfare or hype.

I give this unit 4.5 "Fernandos" in my one to five scoring scale. In other words, a great product. µ

L'INQS
Review pictures and screenshots, plus last-minute comments or corrections - at Fernando Cassia's site