Customer Reviews

Octolinks SW88 8PORT 2PORT Multi Wan Load Balancing Router

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Syswan Octolinks SW88 is an excellent product at a very good price point for performingload balancing across multiple bandwidth WAN circuits from either the same or different circuit providers. Our company, Spot On Networks, installs residential wi-fi networks in apartment and condominium complexes. This product is a key component of our standard network configuration, as we typically will utilize bandwidth from at least two providers at a site, both to have sufficient capacity to support the residential users, as well as to ensure that the site remains online in the event that one of the carriers has an outage.

The Syswan Octolinks SW88 has several important features to achieve proper and robust load balancing across different WAN circuits that one might not necessarily see in other products which are 4x or more the cost of the Syswan Octolinks SW88. These features include support for multiple load balancing schemes to enable balancing across different sized bandwidth circuits, automatic health check to turn off faulty circuts and turn them on again when they recover, and virtual server capability to access equipment on the LAN side of the network from the internet on any of the incoming circuits. In addition, it supports port binding for addresses and ports to ensure that specific circuits are reserved for particular applications, with graceful and transparent failover to other circuits if the designated circuit goes down. It also supports SNMP fo facilitate real-time centralized monitoring of the status, performance, and utliization of each circuit.

The support team at Syswan Technologies has been extremely helpful in working with us, both in terms of resolving technical issues, optimizing settings for our particular applications, as well as adding new features to support our business model and to improve the performance of our networks. Syswan Technologies is a key strategic partner of Spot On Networks. We highly recommend this product for any application where proper load balancing of multiple WAN circuits is required.

Octolinks SW88 8PORT 2PORT Multi Wan Load Balancing Router

Works extremely well. Used it in a configuration with 4 PPoE links and load balanced them on a network.

Things i like about it:
- very stable
- Throughput for steady demand applications like VOIP extremely good. No drops in quality
- Did not face any issues with setup. Smooth sailing
- No issue with VPN connects and dedicated tunnels, no separate setup required.

Things that can change:
- The Web interface is sluggish. The refresh button seems to rebuild the entire screen. Sometimes I felt it brought connectivity down when the page was rebuilding. Momentary pause in voice conversations when page was building.
- Load balancing works to the setting only after sufficient amount of bandwidth usage. Also, if you are using only one desktop and multitasking applications, bandwidth sharing isnt great.
- Heat generation is not big but if you are in hot environments like my setup with no air con, then closed environments will need a cooling fan setup.

I use only the basic functions. However, this product is very easy to set up.
Up to 35Mb I get very good performance - once I get 100Mb it would be interesting to see if it can take it or not.
Endless supply of ports and port configuration options are welcome.