Pros & Cons
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- Good price.
- Excellent throughput at long range.
- Supports WPS.
- Lifetime warranty.
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- Throughput is somewhat slow at the optimal wireless computing range.
- No 5-GHz support.
SMC SMCWGBR14-N Barricade N Specs
| Wireless Parental Controls | |
| Wireless Specification | Yes |
While SMC's products may have disappeared from the shelves at Best Buy, the company still makes solid small-network products. The SMC's latest wireless-n home router, the SMCWGBR14-N Barricade N, runs a bit slow at the optimal wireless computing distance (about 20 feet). It doesn't support 5-GHz operation—a fairly big drawback—but it's reasonably priced ($174.99 list), has a great warranty, and really pumps out the wireless bits at long distances.
The device looks like the average home router—your basic rectangular silver box with three directionally adjustable antennas sprouting off one side. The back has four Gigabit Ethernet ports for wired devices on your LAN and one Internet port for your broadband modem. On the front, in addition to the typical indicators that show per-port speed and activity, you'll find a push button for Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS). Users need only press the button to have WPS-enabled wireless devices to find each other and configure themselves. There's also a USB port on the side for print serving—a nice touch, though I wish SMC had put it on the back with all the other connectors. Not a big ding, but I can't Velcro all the cables together off to one side of the router the way I'd prefer.
SMC forgoes a step-by-step wizard install in favor of a paper-based Quick Installation Guide, which gets you up and running in four steps if you don't have trouble reading small type. Once all the box's lights are green, you can tweak configuration settings using the browser-based management utility built into the router. While this procedure isn't especially geared toward beginners, it's fairly intuitive. I like that all you have to do to apply changes is click on a Save button—you don't have to reboot the router every time you make a change, as you must with many competing products.
Like the D-Link DIR-855, the Barricade includes a couple of ways to protect your traffic. First, there's WISH (Wireless Intelligent Stream Handling). This is a form of quality of service (QoS) optimized for wireless networks, with three traffic forms identified by default: HTTP, Windows Media Center, and Automatic. You can define other traffic types and easily assign one of four priority levels to ensure that the traffic that's most important to you gets the most throughput. The Barricade also includes the Stream Engine technology found in other home routers. Stream Engine doesn't so much protect game traffic as it makes sure to smooth out the traffic flow for a more seamless play experience.
On a more traditional note, SMC has also included a Stateful Packet Inspection firewall, with support for basic content filtering and manual rules configuration. There's also support for a virtual server, as well as parental controls. The former is simply a defined port on the firewall which you can map to a machine on your network; it's useful for hosting an FTP or Web server (including webcams and the like). The latter is a whitelist of Web sites to which the router allows access when filtering is enabled. Everything else gets blocked. On the wireless side, you can choose WEP, WPA or WPA2 wireless security (I highly recommend sticking with WPA2, the most secure), decide whether to broadcast your SSID, change the admin password, and carry out other essential tasks.—
SMC Barricade N on the Line
Performance with the SMC Barricade N is a mixed bag. I was surprised to find that under Ixia's IxChariot and on the jPerf performance test the Barricade managed average throughput of no better than 87 Mbps at optimal range. Worse, adding an 802.11g client to the network dropped average performance all the way to 57 Mbps at the same distance (20 feet) from the router. Compared with the Netgear WNDR3300 in 2.4-GHz mode, that's disappointing. On the upside, at 50 feet there was a performance loss of only 2 to 4 percent, which didn't change at all when I moved to 80 feet. So while throughput at 20 feet isn't as good as with the Netgear, the Barricade sure does better at longer ranges. I still had a 32-Mbps signal all the way at the end of my driveway—and that's over 180 feet!
Overall, I liked the SMC Barricade. It's not as pretty as the new Linksys form factor, but for the money it includes a healthy feature set. I particularly like its range stats for use in larger houses (especially those with multiple floors) or in the yard or on the deck. The lifetime warranty and 24/7 tech support are good features, too.
My only complaints—and the same places where the D-Link DIR-855 comes out ahead—are the lack of 5-GHz spectrum support and some 2.4-GHz wireless-n support that really should have been faster. SMC may be able to straighten that out with a firmware upgrade down the road, but if HD media serving or similar high-bandwidth traffic is a necessity for your wireless network, SMC still has a little work to do. For more typical home network tasks, however, the Barricade is a solid enough solution.
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Final Thoughts
SMC SMCWGBR14-N Barricade N
The nicely priced SMCWGBR14 Barricade N has a decent feature set and performs very well at long range. But it lacks 5-GHz capability and could use better throughput at the 20-foot-and-under range.