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I’ve been using high speed internet since before it was even really publicly available in my local area. When the local telco started doing late stage testing, we were already on the waiting list, and I was literally one of the pioneer customers. Right off the bat we had need of an internet sharing solution, and my research brought me to WinGate, a well known software proxy.

If you know the story on proxies, you know that they are a chore to configure, and are limited in their capabilities (unless you go to great lengths to configure special applications). ICQ, some games, and other programs had some serious problems working with proxies like WinGate, and when you work with a proxy you have to hope that all your client programs support some sort of proxy setup. Back then though, there were no hardware solutions, and I soon stumbled upon Network Address Translation based programs, such as the infamous SyGate.

Now NAT differs from a proxy in that it is completely transparent to those who are in charge in installation. Basically, your client computers act as if they are directly connected to the internet. It’s a very easy, painless, and relatively safe way to share the household or small office internet connection. And now its here in hardware format.

All of the routers we’ve seen so far use NAT both as its method of sharing the internet, and as its “defense” mechanism, since only the router is theoretically visible to the outside network. You can’t fully rely on the routers to stop all attacks though, so know that IP spoofing and other hacker techniques can still get through to you.

One of the biggest benefits of hardware internet gateways is that you will truly have an "always on" internet connection – there is no longer a need to maintain a separate “server” computer that runs your software proxy or NAT. Another benefit that escapes immediate attention is the fact that, though the hardware routers have only 4 integrated Ethernet ports, the routers can support up to 253 client computers. Compare that to a software solution, which often has an increasing price structure based on the number of clients you want to have. Take Wingate Standard edition for example, it costs $499.95 US to get a 50 user license. Even Sybergen’s Sygate costs upwards of $239 for a 25 user license (with upgrades for a year), and though Wingate and Sygate have better reporting/auditing features than any of the routers reviewed here (and let’s not downplay the importance of those detailed logging features), on a per user basis, it just doesn’t stack up. If you were planning for a smaller network, you still have to consider that the average cost for 4-5 users will set you back around $50, and with these new routers, you have a built in 10/100 hub to boot. That’s a lot of value for your money.

Setup and testing

In order to compare the routers on a performance level, we decided that we should determine its WAN-LAN throughput, as well as its performance within the LAN itself. As such we devised simple file transfer tests to determine the upstream and downstream throughput for WAN-LAN transfers, as well as throughput transfers from computer to computer within the intranet. For testing, we used two identical Celeron 566 systems running Win98SE. We used Linksys LNE100TX cards, which were the fastest throughput cards in our NIC card roundup, and as such should cause little bottleneck for the overall set up. All cards and routers were upgraded to the latest available (public) firmware releases as of September 10th, and all tests were run multiple times, with final scores being the average of these multiple test runs.

We found, to our dismay, that all the routers performed essentially identically in terms of intranet file transfers and ping times in games. We’re talking about a 1-2% performance difference between the fastest and slowest routers, and that’s hardly statistically significant. Nevertheless, because the performance differences were pretty consistent throughout our tests, I included the benchmarks near the end of the article, with some small discussion of their significance.