One thing I don't like about SMC is their support- it's very inconsistent. One call you get someone who tells you one thing, the next call you get another rep who contradicts the first and tells you something else, the next call you get routed to their outsourced call center in India where you get a rep who doesn't know anything all about the product.

Fair warning. Don't get the 7004AWBR.

An update:
The AWBR is still being sold, so it has obviously not been discontinued. The VWBR is slightly less buggy than the AWBR, though it is still riddled with bugs. I've since replaced it with a Linksys wireless router and I couldn't be happier.

--Setup was truly a breeze. I don't like expending technical energy to set these things up: my time carries too much value to spend it in endless configuration. I had some weird issues at startup and had trouble getting the LAN connections to work, and the directions (which are mediocre, when they're correct) pointed me into a few dark IP holes. Not too much trauma, though, and I haven't touched setup since Day One.

Windows XP plays nice for basic connections, but ain't nobody happy when things get complex. Two problems:
--WEP: I tried configuring WEP with my Cisco Aironet card and this router, and we were not happy. They took different WEP keys with different bit sizes, and I couldn't get them to speak together: after hitting reset a lot, I bailed on the project.
--Printer: Love the idea of a remote printer. If only the driver didn't crash my computer over and over again. I've decided that's just a project I'll need to take on someday.

--The range? Not fabulous. I can get coverage from one corner of my one-floor apt to the other, but it's spotty from far away. Packets drop but the connection seems to hold.

So? It's fine. Does the job. I haven't adventured quite yet to get the weird stuff to work. Maybe the online help is better than it was two months ago. Have fun!

STABILTIY
Some folks are complaining of requiring multiple restarts. My unit has been running continuously since installation (review updated 12/3/2002) without fail.
Part number is the newer version: 750.5435

PRINT SERVER
While the printed documentation was incorrect, the correct installation procedure for W2K is available on the SMC web site. Printer must be installed as a local printer for W2K. Disable bidirectional printer support.

WIRELESS
The wireless connection reaches all throughout all floors of the house (2 story stud & drywall construction) with similar signal strength, except where the planet gets in the way. i.e. The unit does not like an earthen wall (example reflects basement connection) between the SMC base and the remote machine.

WIRELESS SECURITY
Remember that the latest WEP standard is not perfect. Freely downloadable software could decrypt your key after examining large amounts of packets of data. Help security of your LAN by limiting the machines that can connect by enabling MAC filtering in the setup. This is not a perfect solution, but is does help. Do your online banking from a wired connection.

SPEED
I have noticed zero performance degradation by adding the SMC Barricade.

BOTTOM LINE
This is a great product that I'd recommend to anyone looking to setup an inexpensive LAN with print server for home or small office use.

I had read on other forums about problems with my particular version of this model (750.5435). Apparently there is an older version (750.5312) that doesn't have these problems.

When I contacted tech support (which was responsive on a Sunday morning), and gave them my model number, they knew what was coming. We didn't go very deep into troubleshooting, beyond pinging & rebooting the PC. The rep acknowledged that the other version works better, and is having one of those sent to me as a replacement.

Update: I received the older model, and it did work better than the first unit. But sustaned transfers (like a 1 megabyte download) over the wireless LAN would usually get stuck somewhere in the middle. The wireless link itself stayed up, so I don't know if I can completely blame the router for this - maybe it's a bug in Windows TCP/IP stack, or an incompatability with the Linksys WPC11 PC card I use. But regardless, I've never had this problem with my Netgear router, or public access points, so I'll stick with what works, and this isn't it.

Rick

A random lockup at least once a day where you can still establish radio communication but IP is just not there. A reset fixes this.

A lockup of networking off the box (you can disconnect, re-dial and still not move packets to/fro net). A reset fixes this.

The interface is lacking *bigtime*. Sure, you wouldn't expect to need to be in it beyond initial setup but believe me... you'll be there often checking status during the normally scheduled lockups.

Anyway, if you don't need dialup... get something else. This box is a pain in the rear. I am just hoping they'll update the firmware as I am a slave the the fact that I couldn't find another wireless router with the dial capabilities.

But overall I am impressed with this product. Setting up the printer was a snap too. Although if you have a bi-di printer, make sure you disable bidirectional support in your printer driver. I have an HP LaserJet 6L and I had to disable it to get my printer to work.

It would be nice if it listed the MACs for the connected clients to make it easier to configure MAC access control.

Unfortunately, this device simply locked up and needed to be reset several times a day. I insured that it had the most recent version of the firmware and even tried it in a second location. However, in all cases, it needed to be reset at least once a day if not more.

I'm sure there are people who are having no trouble with this unit. But gauging the number of people who are reporting these lockups, I have to say that this unit is hit or miss. I can't afford to keep missing.

I am very pleased with this purchase.

I use MAC address filtering without any problems, as a second level of security from all three machines. One thing to watch out for is MAC address filtering on the router uses the network MAC address of the wireless cards so enter these addresses, including the ethernet address of the machine connected to the router as well of course!!! However if the ISP is using MAC address provisioning, most ISP's use the MAC physical address of the ethernet card in each machine -- not the wireless cards such as Airport or PCMCIA, etc.

Another interesting thing for those experiencing the seize ups reported in other reviews... my ISP said that if this happens a lot, then they will assign a MAC address to the barricade router itself rather than using the MAC cloning feature or getting the barricade to pretend it was the PC ethernet MAc address as previously provisioned. If you have this type of problem, check your ISP first before putting blame on the Router hardware!

Product documentation is a little weak, so I suggest reading, using general internet info, how this technology all works first before you drive it. I noticed a lot of reviewers had problems turning the WEP 128-byte encryption on from the Apple side. Make sure you have the right revision level of the Airport software installed as anything earlier that 2.0.2 doesn't support 128 byte encryption... basically, it doesn't work as described in documentation. Once up-to-date on revision level, enter the Airport network password as $ followed by the numbers entered into the manually created hex number fields in the barricade WEP encytion setup screen. (13 x 2 digit numbers = 26 character password, so use the $ version (i.e. $xxxxxxxx..) in the Airport setup dialog. If you don't use 128 byte encryption then use the same logic for 13 characters, only wrap these with " " (i.e. "xxxxxxxx") instead of $ prefix -- both as described in the Airport documentation. It then all works like a charm.

Printing works well from both WIN based PC's because the driver support is still much much better than Apple (sorry X10.x is still a bad try at being Windows 95), I am still working on getting to print from the Apple for the kids. You have to look closely at the SMC Router capabilities for the print server... realise the print server from SMC in this product is Windows oriented completely.

If you have a postscript printer connected to the router (which in most cases for the WIN platform you will also have a driver), you will have no problems printing because you can just set the printer up to be a tcp/ip based lpr type printer from the Apple (or even UNIX) side using 192.168.2.1 as the ip address. The print server queue name must be entered as "lpt1" otherwise it doesn't seem to work from Mac or PC, you can't just make up your own queue name. I tried lpr printing from Mac and Win 2000 without problems - setting up an lpr port in Win 2000 was a breeze - except of course I just get postscript directives printed from the Mac versus the real stuff because of the driver problems... see below.

With no postscript printer, you need to pray that you might have a standard printer that both has WIN driver support AS WELL as a PPD or driver suitable for the Classic or X10 Apple OS environment. The driver support for printers in X10 from my experience is really weak, so unless you have a postscript capable printer, don't think of trying to create a hybrid WIN/Apple home network for print sharing using this (or any) router at this time. Even WIN print sharing isn't going to help you as the driver support from an Apple client end is still key to driving the print jobs in the case of non-postscript printers. So if you want both, get a postscript printer which really means the driver (i.e. translator) is in the printer itself versus the the computer, so any old computer can connect to it.

On the subject of support. The one call I made, did get prompted with an "expected time of 30 minutes or more" mesage as others have experienced, but I did get through in the end.

And, -- I did get a call back the same day when the support representative did not know the answer, but could give me further information to assist me, which turned out to be erroneous information and didn't work so that's the reason for this post update..!

I then got my Mac laptop out and plugged in my wireless LAN card (I have an older, pre airport model) and there it was. I just had to type the name of the network I had just created, and I was surfing a shared broadband connection. It got it's IP dynamically from the SMC wireless router.

The range is fine, at least comparable to or greater than what I had gotten with the Airport base station at another location. I had an initial problem reaching the extreme back edge of my patio, but one tweak of the antennas fixed that. Although the documentation didn't mention Appletalk support, the router does in fact handle Appletalk handily. As well as every other protocol and port I've thrown at it (SSH, FTP, VNC, etc).

Many of the competitors require you use platform specific configuration software, needlessly limiting their market. Not so with the SMC. The embedded web server handles all configuration changes nicely, so it doesn't matter what kind of platofrm you are using (Mac, Mac OS X, Linux, peecee, etc.). Just type in the IP to your browser, and the SMC intercepts it and takes you to the configuration pages. They are VERY straightforward.

If it matters, I'm now writing this on a 1997 WallStreet Powerbook running OS X, a LinkSys wireless card, with an open source beta wireless card driver ... I can only assume the router works as well for Windows, but since there's a lot of info out there for those customers and a lot of disinformation out there for Mac users, I wanted this review to make a contribution for that audience. Even if you don't use macs, it's worth considering a device that doesn't depend on platform-specific configuration software to operate properly.

I recommend this product without any reservation.

- Having much problem upgrading the firmware where either after installing the router will seem to 'die' then half an hour come up and so forth, I noticed that firmware was not sticking, meaning it kept going back to the orignal firmware. So I reset the entire router, put a randmon encyryption key, and waited until noon for 2.4ghz phones in my area to minimize. Then flashed to the .004 firmware and thing flashed fine. Before this, I saw the following problems:
1. Intermittent router hangs.
2. Though DMZ claims to be checked, it isn't.

If you see this type of problem, go to status and look at the firmware version. You may be surprised that the firmware is back to the old one. If this is the case, use a wired network to upload the firmware.

After 1.41.004 things are stable. I haven't tried this yet, but I can't get the securemote working, since virtual server seems to filter packets whether hacker protection is on or off.

In short, when it works, it's a nice router. When it doesn't, you have clueless support who can't support. Problem is you have to wait an hour on hold to figure this out.

I have had zero problems with my router and am going to upgrade to their wireless model. Their model is one of the few which will pass Appletalk packets between my Macs.