ISDN Router/Hub Combination Devices: A Complete SOHO Solution?

By Jeff Newman The number and quality of ISDN products continue to increase. And with this improved availability, small office/home office (SOHO) environments have become a viable option for many organizations. Along with a transmission speed of 128 Kbps for simple e-mail and file transfers, SOHO users need integrated network components and support for other resources, such as built-in Ethernet hubs and plain old telephone services (POTS) for voice and fax.

In this roundup, we tested ISDN routers with built-in hubs that are geared for the remote-office environments. All of the routers performed well. Some even offered clever features and approaches to serving a SOHO community of users. But each lacked one or two features that would make it a complete solution for both the remote office a nd the centralized administrator.

To view the Report card.
Of the routers we tested, Cisco System's Cisco 776 Access Router provided the best combination of features, including POTS support and a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server combined with Network Address Translation (NAT).

The rest of the field followed closely on Cisco's heels, with varied feature sets and a mix of strengths and weaknesses. This included ADC Kentrox's PACESETTER SOHO Access Router, which offers a text-based menu instead of a GUI; Ramp Networks' WebRamp EntrŽ, which lacks a good management interface and compression and supports only IP routing; and NetRouter 1040 from ISDNet (the Networking Division of Alpha Telecom) and SBE's netXpand ROUTEMAN XL, wh ich offer strong management and performance, but lack POTS support.

Cisco Systems Cisco 776 Access Router
Offering many value-added features, including the ability to create an administrative configuration, the Cisco 776 Access Router garnered our Editor's Choice award. With adequate performance and the ability to provide DHCP and NAT services at a good price, Cisco's router/hub will fulfill most SOHO needs.

The company has taken steps to anticipate--and eliminate--most of the mistakes users make during installation; it includes a full-color, quick-start guide that matches color-coded cables and color-coded interfaces on the box. The color-coded interfaces and charts help avoid confusion for non-network-savvy users and could eliminate many technical support calls. Although the other products tested had picture diagrams, Cisco's approach is much more intuitive and less open to misinterpretation by novice users.

A Step Ahead? Cisco also provided us with its recentl y released Fast Step management software for its SOHO router line. Fast Step for Windows 3.x is a GUI utility that provides some relief from Cisco's usual command-line management interface. The software offers two easy-to-follow setup routines: one for Internet service provider (ISP) connections (IP only) and one for corporate network connections (IP, IPX, AppleTalk/Windows file and print services).

As long as the address assignments can be allocated from the ISP or corporate router, Fast Step provides painless ISDN router setup. However, to take full advantage of all of the features the router has to offer--such as advanced call handling, static routing to multiple sites, advanced protocol filtering and voice-port prioritization--we had to use the command-line interface either through a serial port connection or telnet.

Although Fast Step is similar to Cisco's Internetwork Operating System (IOS), it has several differences that require getting used to. It wasn't easy getting the Cisco 776 to work wi th our Ascend Communications MAX PRI router. ISDN tests often wouldn't pass, even though we hadn't changed any parameters, and we had to reset the unit to its defaults and power cycle in order to get past them.

One very useful feature Fast Step offers is the ability to load configuration files from disk. This lets a network administrator configure the routes, service profile IDs (SPIDs), passwords and static routes, and save them in a file. With this file, a user can simply apply the predefined settings rather than manually configure the router. This is a great time saver.

To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of ISDN Router/Hub features charts, click here.