Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

 As the workforce continues to take advantage of new technology by working from home or working from remote offices that are closer to home, administrators are faced with the dilemma of how to provide corporate resources to those remote locations at an acceptable cost. ISDN is now widely available, and it has the bandwidth that is required to extend resources found in most central office/LAN environments to the remote office. Applications such as e-mail, file and directory services, Web/Internet transactions and voice communications are among the many resources that ISDN routers are built to provide. They can offer these services to multiple users in a given location for an acceptable cost, as long as administrators make intelligent decisions about the purchase and implementation of the equipment.

In Network Computing's San Mateo lab, we tested SOHO ISDN routers that cost $1,500 or less and route IP at bare minimum. We looked for products that utilize ISDN's features, such as voice capability and multiple channel control, as well as offer money-saving features, such as NAT (Network Address Translation), DHCP and compression algorithms for boosting performance. We also paid some attention to management capabilities, since technical support is rarely present at small remote office sites.

To view the Report card. Of the 13 routers we tested, we were pleasantly surprised by the overall low cost and maturity. We bestow FlowPoint Corp.'s FlowPoint 123 with our Editor's Choice award because of its winning combination of high performance with data compression, effortless Windows GUI-based configuration and management, and low price. Develcon Electronics' Orbitor 500 receives Honorable Mention; it offers many of the same features as the FlowPoint product, but its management interface was not quite up to speed.

Higher price and less support for small-office support features--such as built-in hubs, NAT, DHCP and POTS--separated the other products from the top contenders. These cost-saving features make or break the feasibility of a remote office. ADTRAN's Express XLT had problems negotiating a second B channel with our Cisco AS5300 with compression on, and it failed when trying to transmit precompressed data with compression turned on. OpenROUTE Networks/Proteon's GlobeTrotter GT 75 router had a similar problem for compression with the AS5300 and couldn't handle precompressed data. These problems forced bad performance marks upon these two products.

FlowPoint Corp. FlowPoint 123

Even though FlowPoint 123 didn't have the best management application or the best small-office features, it offered great support in these areas. This support, combined with strong performance and one of the lowest price tags, warranted top honors for FlowPoint. Its management application was dependable, easy to navigate and helped us save time by quickly setting up, monitoring and making changes to the router.

FlowPoint 123 is one of the few routers in the review that offered auto-SPID detection (the ability to poll the switch to find the SPID codes and automatically configure the router for the line's correct settings). Finding and entering SPID codes is often a problem for novice users when configuring ISDN equipment, as SPIDs often consist of long sequences of numbers and can be difficult to obtain from telco support personnel.