A new way to logon

Have you ever lost your ADSL Broadband connection just when you need to log on and and get a vital bit of information from the web? It seems to happen all too often these days and up to now the only way I had found to get round it was to stick my 3G mobile broadband dongle in my laptop or main computer and log in that way until ADSL came back up. This week I found a better way.

The picture above is the Billion 7420nx 3G/ADSL Gigabit Wireless router. What it does is monitor the strength of your ADSL connection and if it goes down, after a short pause of 2 minutes, it swaps over to the 3G dongle that fits in a USB port on the back of the router. This will allow most home workers just enough time to visit the loo and make a fresh coffee before starting work again.

The Billion 7420nx has yet more tricks up its sleeve. It has 802.11n wireless networking. 802.11n networks support approximately 300 Mbps of rated (theoretical) bandwidth under the best conditions. This is fast enough and has enough bandwidth to cope with almost anything a house full of teenagers could demand of it as well as cope with all the load a home worker could ask for. Last but by no means least, the bottle neck in a wired network has always been the router’s 100 Mbps speed while office networks handling large amounts of data want to run at Gigabit speed (1000 Mbps). This router does away with having to have a Gigabit switch down stream to allow the computers on the network to communicate at 1000 Mbps because its four Ethernet ports are all Gigabit ones. I noticed the increase in speed across my network as soon as I connected the router and I now find that videos stream just fine from my server to the multimedia computer in the lounge so I no longer have to copy the file over before watching a film.

I must admit this is not the easiest router I have setup because unlike the Netgear ones I have used previously, this one assumes you have some knowledge of what you are doing so it isn't for a beginner. Having said that, there is a very good User Guide in PDF form on the driver CD and also a quick setup printed guide that will ensure you get all the cables in the right holes. After that once you have established a connection between the router and your computer, there is a setup utility on the CD which claims to do the rest of the setup for you. I didn't try it as my network settings are none standard and I didn't want to lose a good few of my peripherals so I used the Gui interface through my browser.

When I have had it running for a week or two I will let you know if there are any snags to running this router.