By Tikkler - December 12, 2000

Infobox

What? Barricade 4-Port Broadband Router Product Page Who? SMC Networks, Inc. Home Page How much? $139 (Est. Street)

So, you've finally managed to put together that second computer system from those spare computer parts that have been sitting around and collecting dust, but now what? Windows is installed, Office is installed, but you want to do more with it. Unfortunately, chances are, that second machine won't be nearly powerful enough to play most of today's games on it, so I guess you're limited to Solitaire... not!

What you really would like to do is share your Internet connection between all your computers. You've done the research: you need to set up a network and then run some sort of Internet connection sharing software on one of the computers. Before you go and spend the time and money to set this all up, set some time aside to read this review of one of a new breed of devices called broadband routers.

Classic routers have been around for quite some time and are basically devices that connect to a network to redirect network traffic from one source to multiple devices. They were mainly only reserved for businesses that had stashes of cash lying around because of their high costs (often thousands of dollars), but since lately, many manufacturers have begun producing consumer-level routers designed for sharing a high-speed connection, such as Cable or ADSL, between multiple computers.

Today we take a look at one of these devices, the Barricade 4-port broadband router from SMC Networks, and share with you our experiences and thoughts regarding it when compared to the before-mentioned method of Internet connection sharing.

On to: Software vs. Hardware