The Home Wireless Gateway is not a bad product. In fact, the system is well-engineered, and it never gave us a problem during testing. But with the gateway's middling pricing and a feature set that was lacking, 3Com will need to depend on brand recognition and customer loyalty to move these boxes.

On the bright side, 3Com's management interface was among the best, though the company did stump us by never mentioning the account name and password for the administrator in its documentation (default supervisor user name is admin, with no password). We also liked the product's diagnostic capabilities, and a number of features demonstrate 3Com's commitment to making its products accessible to a nontechnical market, such as including product support phone numbers in the unit's help system. We also liked the product's ability to restrict access to services by time of day.

On the negative side, certain features we came to expect in this product category are not available on the Home Wireless Gateway. For example, while limited port filtering is available, only e-mail, Web, FTP, NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) and telnet can be blocked. In addition, the product does not provide port-forwarding capabilities or support for DMZ hosts. We think 3Com may have been driven by a desire to keep the product simple and secure to use, and in fairness many users will not miss these features. But if you need them, you'll have to look elsewhere.

A bright note is performance, where the Home Wireless Gateway finished near the top among all the products we tested. On the other hand, the device finished near the bottom of the pack in our range testing.