Customer Reviews

SMC2404WBR Barricade Turbo 11/22 Mbps Wireless Cable/DSL Broadband Router

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

My home 802.11b wireless setup consists of bits and pieces from different manufacturers--usually whatever is cheapest at the time. I've got a Motorola SB4200 cablemodem, a Compaq wireless access point, a generic Prism chipset wireless PCI card, a Netgear wireless PC Card, a Lucent/Avaya wireless PC Card, and a Linksys BEFSR41 broadband gateway. Around Christmas time, I decided it was time to simplify things a little and replace two pieces of gear (the Linksys gateway and the Compaq wireless access point) with an all-in-one wireless gateway.

I picked this SMC due to the low price without doing a lick of research, but I've been pleasantly surprised. The wireless performance is fine in my 3-story house, and there have been no interoperability problems with the other brands of wireless equipment I use. I don't yet have a matching 22Mbps "turbo" PC Card to take advantage of the faster speeds and 256-bit WEP encryption supported by the TI ACX100 chipset this unit uses, but I'll probably pick one up as soon as the price is low enough. On the firewall side, this unit has just about all the features of my old Linksys and also adds Stateful Packet Inspection.

Overall, a great value for the money.

very bad hardware. After 4 weeks the router started to hang, and I had to reboot it to unlock it. Now this happens every hour, and anyway when it is working my pages take 5 second to load, slower than dial up and I am on cable.
I own and have used lynksis, netgear and belkin, all of them without a problem. I bought smc because of a professional review, but this is bad equipment.
Their support is terrible, if you go to their website you cannot even find new or old firmware for this model.
of course they don't want to honor the warranty because "it is working". Stay away!!!!

Very poor range even for home networking. Got this in a bundle with SMC wireless laptop card. In the manual for the card SMC claims 1300 feet, router 1155 feet... Signal has failed after 25 feet of space with no obstructions, and 15 feet if one wall is present. For those of you who like me hope to put the router on one floor, and use your computer on another stay away from this product!!! In addition, if you choose to use encryption, your PC will freeze... The higher the level of encryption the faster it freezes.

Works great with my cable modem. Doesn't seem to be any problems.

After returning a Dlink 614+ that kept dropping my connection every 30 minutes and then finally fried itself when tech support instructed me to upgrade the firmware - I bought this SMC router and a wireless card. The set-up was a piece of cake. The wireless access works flawlessly and the range within my house is far superior to the Dlink 614+. I just saved $70 and couldn't be happier.

Bad router. Slow, unstable and extremely weak signals. SMC had some good products, but this is definitely not one of them.

Please for the love of GOD, do not buy this router! It is the worst wireless router that I have ever purchased and used. As many other reviewers have wrote, this *POS* hangs and the generated signal is undoubtedly the weakest of its class. It is unnecessary to recommend another brand because you can't get anything worse. The only good thing about this is that it still "runs" even after I threw it against the wall a couple of times out of frustration!

This router worked pretty well for me for the first three or four months that I had it, but I started having connectivity problems after that. I left it with my girlfriend while I was out of the country for six months but she never really got it set up right. When I got home and set it back up, I had major wireless connectivity problems - with my laptop on my desk two feet from the router, it would take five minutes for the router to assign an IP, and then it would drop the connection. I've now replaced the Barricade with a Netgear and my only complaint after three months is that secured sites sometimes have a lot of lag, which was true with the old router anyway. I thought SMC was a reputable brand but both this product and the older version my father has have been unimpressive for wireless use. I won't be buying another SMC in the future unless it's really throwaway cheap.

I read some of the reviews stating that this router wont work with Alcatel modems, but i decided to buy it anyways knowing I have an Alcatel modem myself (Alcatel 1000ADSL). In the begining It didn't work, so I called tech support, they guided me through the "Advanced Process" and I was able to get my router to work with my Alcatel Modem.

I had the same problem with this router/Alcatel DSL modem combination. I spent a lot of time configuring the thing: updating the firmware, etc. but it just wouldn't work. It's upsetting to connect my computers to my old (wired) Linksys and have everything go so smoothly, while the same (simple) configuration on the SMC goes nowhere.

SMC Tech Support told me they have had no specific problems with Alcatel modems. I don't know though. I can return my Barricade for a new one, but I don't want to go through another day like the one I just had. I'm going to try to exchange for another product.