Customer Reviews

SMC7004AWBR Barricade Cable/DSL router w/ 3-port 10/100Mbps, Print Server, and 802.11b 11Mbps Access Point

5 star:		(107)
4 star:		(58)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(25)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

This product was my first attempt at any type of home networking and I had never used a wireless router before. I was very interested in the wireless capability since I mostly use a notebook computer through a DSL connection. Before when I used the computer I was forced to do so in a specific corner of the room so that I was close enough to the phone line that the DSL modem was connected to. Besides the phone cable, there was the ethernet cable running from the modem to the computer, the modem power cable with huge wall wart, a printer cable and printer power cord. It was a mess. The SMC allowed me to move this whole mess into a desk unit, hidden away from sight. In all it took me about an 1/2 hour to install the SMC, connect it to my DSL modem (I did so first through the wired connection to my computer), install the print server and then the SMC wireless card. Without any prior experience the installation went smoothly and without any problem at all. The print server works like a dream and all the documentation, while not extensive, was enough to lead me through all the needed steps. I also connected one of the wired ports to my wife's MAC (I'm PC) and had her using the same DSL connection in about 5 more minutes. I haven't tried to print with the MAC through the server yet, but the documentation says it is possible, but not a supported feature. For me it would just be a bonus to be able to use the same printer for MAC and PC, but the router itself is worth it's weight in gold. I even found that my DSL connection seemed faster when routed through the SMC. The wireless performance is nothing short of amazing and although I do have spots in the house where the performance fails, it works everywhere I need it to. I found just by adjusting the position of the unit and the antenna you can make a connection even in the difficult spots. For the price I couldn't find a better rated unit with this many features and I am please to have purchased it. It's one of those things you say to yourself, "why didn't I do this sooner."

I had a LinkSys wireless router and got rid of that one and replaced it with the SMC. I am a cable modem user in a wooden structure house. I did keep the LinkSys PC Card (no compatability issues. Haven't used WEP though)

The device works great. Advertised range is very optimistic. The web pages load faster than the LinkSys. It has the parallel print server and serial port (for those not yet on broadband or who want a backup).

The only complaint so far is that the LED lights are recessed, so they are invisible if you are not looking at the device headon.

I do like how they put the ports on the back instead in the front like their previous wireless router. Also the rounded style is an improvement over the very plain, boxy old one.

The presence of only 3 ports may be an issue for some people. Or it could be a justification to get a PCI wireless card for that fourth PC. (glass is half-full/half-empty). Also, there is no dedicated uplink port (not a big deal if you have a hub w/ uplink or crossover cable). The adapter is substantially blukier than the one in the Linksys package. But you do get a 10 foot cable in the box.

I have to say that I'm very impressed with the Barricade line of products. After going through 3 wired Linksys broadband routers, I was totally put off by their products. I would get frequent disconnects, couldn't re-logon/negotiate protocol, etc. until the routers finally died out. I saw the SMC Barricade regular broadband router (not wireless) and used it for 2 months. Not only do I believe it to the best router for the money, I believe it to be one of the best PERIOD. In the 2-month period I used the router, I never got dropped once from my connection. This made we decide to try the SMC Barricade Wireless. I've only used it 2 days, but the product actually works as advertised. I unplugged my wired router, plugged in the proper cables and I was up and running in less than 5 minutes. The web setup feature could be improved, but is still easy to use. The distances advertised are a little optimistic though. I live in a third floor apartment, and wanted to test how far I could go with my laptop. I went across the street and sat on my car and still connected to my 1500/384 dsl connection at about 350kbps. One little tip: don't put the router next to any electrical appliances (especially your desktop computer). I have mine placed on the wall about 5 feet off the floor.

I have no complaints regarding this router. I purchased this unit approximately 2 weeks ago to replace the Linksys 1 port router I was using up to this point. The Linksys worked perfectly and I nearly bought the Linksys wireless but the price was right on this unit and I took a gamble. I am glad that I did.

In two weeks of use I have only had to reset the router once and I am not even sure that this was the routers fault. It may have been my DSL modems fault. One day after I bought the unit I had a hardware failure on the D-Link wireless LAN card. In the process of troubleshooting the problem I called SMC support number. The number is toll free and the help was quick, no waiting on hold. The tech support person was courteous, knowledgeable and didn't seem in a rush to get me off the phone. I was very impressed. This was a far cry from the support I have gotten from D-Link and Linksys. Both of these companies make decent hardware but support is not there strong point and Linksys has virtually no documentation or online support.

I have upgraded the firmware once and it was trouble free. The web based control panel is comprehensive and easy to use. If anything the control panel is even more useful and flexible then the comparable Linksys router. The unit itself is small and attractive. The only negative I have is that the lights on the front of the router are not clearly viewable except when looked at head on.

The range on this unit is great. I live in a townhouse that has 1200 square feet upstairs and 1200 square feet downstairs. The router is in the northwest corner of the downstairs and I use the wireless units most commonly in the southeast corner of the upstairs. The transfer rate is a consistent 11 mbs even when I step outside.

Over all an excellent router. I have run it with both the Linksys and D-Link cards and both work fine. The D-Link card comes with better monitoring software but the Linksys card seems to give me greater range and consistency. A definite buy recommendation on my part.

I've owned this router for some time, and did tons of research. Granted I am not a typical user, you should be warned with this company's shady business practice. Many of you wonder what's going on with the mixed reviews and here's why...

SMC sells this router with 2 models with completely different hardware. One is the 750.5312 model. This is the model that was reviewed and gotten great reviews. Then the other 'shady' model they slipped into the market is the infamous 750.5435 model. This is the 'junk' model that they have not distributed to reviewers.

The 5312 model is wonderful piece. If you have it, you'll love it. Every 3 months or so, I will have to power it down, and I am not sure why. Besides that, it's wonderful. The router requires you to 'reboot' almost every time you change something, but it's a minior thing you have to live with.
- SecuRemote worked like a champ with no packet forwarding.

The 5435 has tons of problems and they are:
- Inability to handle large files (>100megs). It hands the router. (Supposidly a bad capacitor...)
- Unable to forward UDP packets. Though the router's page claims to work and their idiotic support claims they work, it doesn't. I spent weeks troubleshooting and sniffing the packets and found out it just doesn't foward udp packets.
- Router is flaky in general. I attribute this to combination of router getting confused with 2.4ghz phone nearby and overheating.

In short, I had a 5435 and after fighting battles with it and the support for 4 months, I got SMC to replace it with 5312. After a year with 5312, I am very pleased.

In short, if you have the 750.5435, it'll work fine for normal web surfing but beyond that, you will soon run into problems mentioned above. Maybe a newer firmware (I never saw one in 4 months), may resolve few things but their support is useless and will give you a run-around.

If you have the 750.5312, it's a keeper. I love mine.

A really GREAT product. Had it up and working easily. I have a Win98 PC connected to the Router, connected to cable modem. Have a Win2K laptop connected wirelessly using SMC PCMCIA wireless card and also iMAC G3 connected via Airport card. All work terrifically over the house connected to the Internet. It is great to sit outdoors and use the internet for office/general interconnection use, without wires all over the place!!! As of the time of writing this review, the firmware revision level and hardware from purchase were at the latest; so I have not experienced any of the issues previous reviewers discuss. It doesn't even run hot and I didn't have to use the little blue feet stickers!

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 did alot of research on a new Wireless router and after reading all conflicting reviews for the same product from several leading sites you are totally confused. You find people that love the product or they want to throw out of the window.

I LOVE THIS PRODUCT - I bought the SMC router, the SMC wireless USB and the SMC wireless laptop card so now I have three computers all connected to the same cable modem all on Windows ME. You read about poor reception - well let me tell you - I have 3500 sq feet house on 3 levels with the router on the ground floor on one side of the house and I can roam around the house from the basement to the 2nd floor and outside with good to decent signal. For a trial I was streaming a video from a web site at 300kbps to the laptop and I moved everywhere, even outside (at 19 degree...freezing) and I never lost signal or switched to lower bandwith.

You read about people having difficulties and having to reset the router many times - never happened to me. Since the day I received and installed this router and the two wireless cards, I never had to reset anything. My advise: If the router work just fine when you first install you don't need to upgrade to the latest firmware release just to be on the latest (this is called bloody edge technology not leading edge technology)

I thought that was difficult to install the set. very simple - If you are using OptimumOnline cable modem just power off your computer, power off the cable modem for about 2 minutes, connect the network cables and power on everything -You are now up and running. For the wireless cards - Install the card or the USB cable, power on your computer and install the software (do not change configuration) - after 2 minutes (time to start your computer and install the small SMC software you have a home wireless network.

I currentely use my Pentium 4 Dell 8100 as a server and the other two PC as clients transfering amongst the three PC several mb of data.

Highly recomend the SMC router and the SMC USB card.

All connections were a snap. Made the physical connections to my DSL modem and wired LAN adapters, rebooted, and I was up. After that, I fired up my corporate laptop w/ a Cisco Aironet card, and it found the AP without a hitch. I was immediately able to tunnel into my office firewall from the other end of the house and way out in the back yard (through 3-4 walls). It's extremely gratifying to get easy installation, good performance, and a great price!

I'm another Linksys BEFW11S4 refugee ... I just set up the Barricade, including wireless. in about 10 minutes with minimal reference to the manual. Had a little trouble getting the setup page to come up in the browser, but otherwise setup was trivial.

I do wish they had Mac setup instructions, as with the Mac there are really only two steps required to get TCP/IP going -- select DHCP in the Mac TCP/IP control panel (if that's what you want), and enter the Host name in the router's setup (if, like me, you have a cable modem that requires it). (The router defaults to dynamic IP, which simply means it expects a broadband connection that supplies all the config #'s.)

All done. Typing this review wirelessly from an iBook :) I updated the firmware easily -- get the .bin file from http://www.smc.com/smc/pages_html/support.html and click "update firmware" in the router's web screen.

Haven't tested throughtput, range, or WEP yet, but after MUCH hassling with the Linksys this is manna from heaven. I should've listened to the warnings....

I got my desk top set up right away, online in a snap. Wireless is where I had my problem. Got a D-Link Laptop card, The whole reason for this piece. D-Link card tells me I have a great signal but refused to give me a 192.168..... router IP. Rebooted many a time. Finally called SMC tech support, held for 45min., Tech online told me to reboot the router (6th time) and i'm magically pinging the whole world. I'm currently outside on my patio, at night (I can see my screen!) drinkin a few cuz i'm happy and streaming 256k mp3's at the same time!!! It's smaller than you think, like the size of 2 portable CD players next to each other. I've got mine in the basement with my cable modem hook up and can get a signal out here and up on the second floor no problem (except my D-Link says it's not connected at all) and get about 200Kbps downloads!! Solid!! Takes a little fiddleing with, I'm a Cisco person so I thought I knew it all but still wound up calling tech support. Reboot is your friend. Hope this helps. Chillin on the terrace like a villin. (hehe)