Great little router
Pros:
Up and running in 5 minutes or less
Cons:
Some router settings are complex. Could use wall or undermount to hide the unit.
The Bottom Line:
Best 8 port hard wired router on the market for the money.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I'm a home networking freak and had my new house wired with category 5 Ethernet cable in every room of the house. I even made the connectors and hooked everything u0p my self. When broadband showed up to my house, I was ecstatic. I went out and spent some $300 on a new router and a couple of wireless cards for the laptops.
In case some of you are wondering, the only reason you "Really" need a router is to connect multiple computers across one broadband connection. This unit manages and protects your home computer from the public internet and only lets the network provider see itself, not your individual computers using what is called a firewall.
But enough of the education, I slowly and painfully discovered that I had made a mistake and started with Dlink DI-713P. Read my review and you'll know why I changed.
So I went out and purchased a router with a lot of ports (for the entire house) and didn't want to spend tons of money again. So I got this 8 port linksys BEFSR81.
Within 5 minutes I was up and running and all my computers had received IP address and were running fast than the previous router. The instructions are extremely idiot proof. But the real test was whether or not I could connect to my office VPN. You see, I telework several days a week from home. The office gives me this software that creates a secure connection through the internet to the office. Routers were designed to transparently pass this service through without touching it and as I discovered some do not do this very well at all. In fact, some routers slow to speeds rivalling your old 14.4Kbps modem.
So, I did some testing and tested to some well known internet test sites and using one PC only. Here were my results:
Connecting to an internet test site without the router: 1200 Kbps downloads - the max according the cable company
Connected to my office VPN without the router:
1150 Kbps download - a negligible difference
Connected to the Internet with the router:
1200 Kbps - same as before without the router - amazing
Connected to my office VPN without the router:
1100 Kbps download - once again a negligible difference
Perfect, so now I know that this is a high performance router.
The unit came with everything you need to get going including the cables, power supplies, software, etc. The unit is attractive enough to put on your desk, though I keep mine in the basement. Some mounting screws for a wall mount or undermount would have been nice.
Also, if you network using a router, buy a backup power supply. These units tend to require hard resets if your house ever experiences any kind of power glitch including outages, or just light flickering. Small UPS's can be found for $20-40, well worth the investment and besides when the power goes out, your battery powered laptop will still be connected to the Internet. A bonus.
Bottom line: I would highly recommend this to anyone. If you want wireless capabilities, buy a separate $50 access point(s) closest to where you intend to use the wireless PC's.
