Customer Reviews

Duolinks SW24 2PORT Dual Wan Load Balancing Router

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It's hard to find a load balancing router for a smaller business that is simple and easy to integrate into the network, provides security and the necessary backup connectivity that is beneficial to a business without breaking the bank. Recently, we purchased the Duolinks SW24 2PORT Dual Wan Load Balancing Router for less than $140. It was promptly delivered and easy to setup right out of the box. We didn't have to call in a "pro" to integrate the unit into our network. Basically, over 95% of the work our business processes require internet connectivity through portals and websites. We need a solid router that provides security as well as uninterrupted internet connectivity. This router does the job. We're using it with cable and DSL. The unit easily balances our traffic across these connections. During the few months it has been in service, at least one of the connections has had trouble or failed but with the router in place, it was a seamless blip that did not impact our business. The unit "failed over" to the active connection without interrupting the network. The router is easily configured through a browser interface and has many different functions we are still learning and utilizing. It provides a good firewall for security as well as the ability to block inappropriate traffic. We're extremely happy with our choice and look forward to learning more about the router and its capabilities. All this makes it extremely affordable for the home or small to medium business that doesn't need the complicated Cisco routers and the highly paid contractors needed to install and maintain them.

I bought this router for our small office... we depend heavily on reliable internet connectivity, and have incoming cable (primary, DHCP) and DSL (backup, PPPoE) connections.

Setup was fairly straightforward (I'm no networking expert, but have set up 8 or 10 other routers), and we were up and running in under an hour. I didn't use load balancing, because our cable is much, much faster than the DSL... we'd rather just use that whenever it's available, and failover to the DSL only when the cable goes down. The SW24 seemed to handle link "health checks" and automatic failover just fine.

Where we had problems though was on more mundane NAT routing functionality. We had frequent dropped SSL connections and browsing failures (IE "cannot load the page"). Invariably, these were momentary failures, and a browser refresh (or re-logging in to secure sites) would immediately succeed... but when it happens on an hourly basis to multiple users, it's just not tolerable. Syswan tech support was responsive and helpful, and we determined that it was most likely related to a DNS caching problem in the SW24. Passing internet DSN servers (openDNS or Level3) to our DHCP clients (instead of just giving them the router's 192.168.1.1 address as the only DNS server) reduced the frequency of dropped connections, but didn't solve the problem.

Tech support suggested a new/beta firmware that allows the router's internal DNS caching to be disabled. This firmware was supposed to be emailed to me, but wasn't, and I decided I was tired of messing with it. So after fooling with this router and tolerating unstable internet connectivity for several weeks, I gave up, returned the SW24, and bought a Peplink 20L. Peplink just worked straight out of the box... much happier with it.

Obviously others have had better luck with this router, but for whatever reason, it didn't work reliably in our situation.

This does exactly what it claims to do, and does it well. I have two internet connections, and this lets me use the combined bandwidth reliably. The firmware is difficult to work with, but it's well organized and I can't really see how it can be improved given all the very granular options that are available. The VPN connection works very well, but you do have to purchase the client after the trial period is over. Fortunately, it's not expensive.

When I ran into a problem with advanced configurations, it took me no time at all to get a technical support person on the line. Better yet, they didn't stick me with some first-level tech. Instead, they connected me directly with someone that knew *everything* about the router and the most recent version of the firmware. They walked me through the advanced options, and even offered to log in remotely when I couldn't solve the problem myself. When all was said and done, they spent a couple of hours on the phone with me and were amazingly patient the entire time. They even followed up to make sure it was working properly. I wish more companies offered this level of support. If you're looking for a dual-homed router, this is the one!

After a little work and help from some tech support, I am totally happy with this router.

My setup: I have 2 DSL lines into my house. I set it up without too much headache. I set each DSL modem to "bridge mode" and then I setup the SW24 router for each WAN port to be PPPoE and entered my DSL username & password for each WAN port. I found plenty of help for this online by Googling.

After setup, I left everything else the default and the router would invariably "pick" one WAN port over the other and I would see 99% traffic on one WAN port (I didn't see any rhyme or reason as to which port it used).

I emailed support and gave them the username & password to login to my router (I turned on "remote setup" in my router to give them access). Within 24 hours, they had logged in and changed some settings, and presto-magico everything is working great!

I expected a little work to get going, but their email support took care of the things I was stuck on. I would recommend this, especially if you are comfortable with tinkering with network stuff. Allow a few hours to get it working and possibly a few more days to get the kinks worked out.

By the way, I also schedule the router to reboot every night while I am asleep. I have no idea if this helps, but I've never had to force a reboot any other time (unless I update a setting).

short on time, short review.

I am overall happy with this product. I especially like the email notification feature if one of the WANS goes down.

One thing odd about it is that I have the balancing set to 50% for each device but the actual usage tends to be 96% WAN1 and 4% WAN2. This could be because some of my stuff depends on the STATIC IP (WEBSERVER) of WAN1 and would need to use that interface, but I don't think I generate that much traffic. Our pleasure surfing and other work related Internet usage can and should go out on either connection. I haven't yet figured out how this thing works regarding this. When I connect a single computer or device to the Internet, is that IP address given the same WAN resource for the entire session, or is it based on individual programs (traffic types) or ports? I am really not sure. Like, when I turn on a computer, is it using WAN1 the whole session for email and everything else, or may it be using WAN1 for Firefox and WAN2 for email. Or does each request get balanced out on WAN1 or WAN2, say, in a single Firefox instance. This would be nice to understand how it manages traffic.

All I can say is that it works and it works well. If I pull the plug on one connection it almost instantly jumps to the second. Sure, VoIP calls are dropped due to the nature of VoIP if it is using WAN1 and WAN1 goes off during a call. But then Vonage connects right up to WAN2 for the next call.

I am a computer person by trade and it was average as far as difficulty setting it up for such a product. I think the common folk may need some help optimizing it somewhat or even just getting it to work right.

I like it and recommend it.

Easy to use and fairly easy to setup (took me a dedicated night to get it going). To be clear, dual WAN routers will not increase your connection speeds. They are about enhancing reliability and increasing throughput to mulitple systems. That said, this is a solid product.

We had previously run off of cable successfully for about a year. After network "upgrades" allowing for higher tiered speeds in our area, the connection started getting worse and worse. When the cable company ignored our requests for help, we decided to get DSL as well. After factoring in the costs of DSL plus several phone lines we needed we eventually just went with a T1. Our work is 95% online, and the requirement for a stable connection is critical. We run a lot of applications that require reliable / consistent access to the internet or the whole application must start over, even with the best way this could be coded we are doing a lot of custom things here that can't overcome the other end's policies / protocols.

Overall, this router has served us well enough for the price. It is highly reliable within how it does operate.

Our cable line is 12Mbps / 2Mbps (Go figure it has worked perfectly since the installation of our T1).
The T1 is 1.5Mbps / 1.5Mbps

The load balancing certainly has its shortcomings, particularly in a setting where the speeds between the two connections are so drastically different. Lets say you want to "download all big files" from the cable, there is no option to do any thing. This could be accomplished by setting protocols to be used on certain servers, or for certain file extensions to be used on the cable - There is no option such as setting "Use FTP only on WAN 2" or "Use URLs containing .zip, .exe, .rar, etc on WAN 2". You can set only the amount of connections that are open between the two, or transferred / received bytes to be balance. So, if you download a big file on one connection, it will favor the other WAN port all day long until the load has evened out between the two. Some applications just plain don't support connections going out from multiple IPs either, so they will marginally work, or not at all (Take for instance my personal hobby is Chess, and I share a lot of that data over eMule P2P client).

In the end, we set it to use the T1 100% of the time. If the T1 does go down, it does (almost seamlessly) switch over to using the cable line, this is both by straight packet / data loss or by the connection being physically unplugged.

There is some manipulation possible, such as switching the load over 100% to the WAN 2 port, start downloading a large file, then switch it back 100% to WAN 1. This will continue the download on the second port. I put a shortcut to the router in my browser so this is just a click or two away.

One simple and great feature I wish it had would be to say such-and-such local IP uses WAN 2, while all the rest use WAN 1. This would be great so you could have cable-bandwidth while needing to download files on one PC, but all other PCs on the network would continue to use WAN 1 seamlessly. The router does require a HTTPS in front of the router IP, not HTTP, which confused me for a little bit having not read the manual beforehand - Hopefully that comment can save you a little wasted time.

In the end, it is lacking many possible features that could make it much more robust. It is good for redundancy and on-the-fly changing of which connection you are using without ever leaving your desk. Other reviews note VPN problems, we have no need for VPN so keep that in mind as well. For an office only accessing web based data, you are probably going to be perfect setting the load to 50/50 and going with it despite all my above comments. If you do anything outside of what your mom would do on the internet, expect some fumbling around to figure out what works best for you personally.

We subscribed to another ISP and purchased the SW24 so that we would have failover if our primary ISP went down. Setting up the SW24 and getting the basic network up & running only took a few minutes.

We did have some special considerations for our I.P. phones and our VPN, so I called tech support.

They were incredibly responsive and helpful, getting all of our issues resolved in a timely and professional manner. I would highly recommend them.

This router works very well, and not just for the cost. Its feature list is huge and on top of that its stable. Setup is a little strange because they use a lot of old/unfamiliar terminology--at least for me anyway. For instance, there is not a 'Port Forward' area. They have it under 'Virtual Server'. One quick look and you can see it works exactly the same as your standard home router port forward but with the addition of wan1/wan2 indicators. One thing that really helped me figure out how to use all the features was looking at BOTH product document manuals on the website. I'm not sure why, but if you go to their website, click on this router, and click on documents it gives you the option for a PDF or HTML. You would think they both contain the same info but they don't. The PDF is more like definitions for each option while the HTML is more of a walk through with examples in some cases (I also think the HTML's page numbers are arranged in the order they feel you should set up the router). Also, in a few cases, both manuals seem to give data that the other doesn't have. So, if your not sure about a feature make sure to read about it in both manuals!

Cons:
No Scheduler
No 30 Day Usage Monitor

Anyway, mine is working flawless with both WANs and all kind of cool settings to make sure my network is running perfect--ALWAYS!

So far, this router is perfect! We only use one of the WAN ports, but this device allows for up to 20 VPN tunnels to pass through (technical support told me that), whereas residential-grade routers usually offer only 1 or 2 tunnels. (1 Tunnel = 1 VPN Connection)

Another plus that I didn't expect is that this router can be a gateway for other segments on the LAN. I was able to set it up so that the VPN users on a different subnet could access the internet from their local machines by adding a gateway for their segment on the router.