Take your router anywhere — even in the car — if you’ve got EV-DO to power its backhaul connection to the Internet. The good, the bad and the ugly in testing the laptop 3G capabilities of one of America's biggest mobile operators.
As a recent Comcast service outage clearly demonstrated to me, many of us work in a world that’s increasingly dependent on Internet access. I have a Verizon Wireless EV-DO 3G card for my notebook to provide Internet access when I travel, but that couldn’t help my co-workers during my cable Internet service outage. Fortunately, when the outage occurred, I was in the process of reviewing D-Link’s DIR-450 3G Mobile Router for EV-DO Networks.
The Basics
The DIR-450 is a traditional D-Link router with many of the advanced features I liked when I reviewed both the DIR-635 and the DIR-655 routers. The DIR-450 is housed in a case virtually identical to that used on the DIR-635.
Only when you look at the rear of the DIR-450 will you notice that instead of an Ethernet WAN port, there’s a PC card slot to accommodate an EV-DO card.
For sharing the EV-DO Internet connection, the DIR-450 includes four 10/100 LAN ports as well as a standards-based 802.11g radio featuring Atheros’ Super-G technology. It uses traditional NAT (network address translation) technology to map the public IP address of your EV-DO card onto a private network. An SPI (stateful packet inspection) firewall protects your private network from attacks and unwanted intrusions.
Why a 3G Router?
There are many potential uses for a router that lets you share your 3G connection. Some examples might include the following:
* When working at client sites, consultants and auditors frequently are denied access to the client’s network for security reasons, but they still need to communicate with each other and with their home office. * Groups of employees can create ad-hoc Internet-connected workgroups in hotel conference rooms when the hotel doesn’t supply an Internet connection. * Emergency responders can set up an ad-hoc wireless network quickly at the scene of an accident or emergency to access vital information and resources. * On vacation, multiple family members traveling with laptops can all stay connected with friends (and, unfortunately, the office). * You might live in an area where cellular Internet access is the only service available; you can share the Internet connection with other computers on your home network.
Setup
The DIR-450 has an eight-page printed quick install guide. This guide, as well as the user manual, is also supplied on CD. However, there is no CD-Based installation wizard as was supplied with other D-Link routers. Instead, the quick install guide instructs you to plug in your EV-DO card, connect one of the LAN ports to your computer, and browse to the default IP address (192.168.0.1).
You can choose either to manually configure your settings or use the built-in setup wizard. Clicking on the setup wizard takes you to a second page where you can choose a wizard for setting up your Internet connection, or a wizard for configuring your wireless security. The Internet connection wizard lets you set an administrative password for the router, set your time zone and configure the router for your EV-DO card. I chose manual configuration. I selected my EV-DO card from the drop-down list and hit "save." The router rebooted with the new configuration and connected to the Internet after the reboot. It was that easy.
The DIR-450 currently supports a total of 19 wireless broadband (aka, wireless WAN, or WWAN) cards. Compatible service providers in the US include ACS Wireless, Alltel, Cellular South, Embarq, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless, and many others in Canada. It will work with cards from Sierra Wireless, Novatel, Kyocera and others. In fact, during the review process, additional supported cards were added via a firmware upgrade.
D-Link also sells the DIR-451, which is essentially a DIR-450 that supports UMTS or HSDPA cellular data networks. Compatible service providers in the US for the DIR-451 are Cingular (AT&T) and T-Mobile.
Though the DIR-450 ships with wireless security disabled, the wireless security wizard walks you through naming your wireless network, choosing the appropriate level of security and setting your pre-shared WPA or WEP key. Again, I selected manual configuration. You can enable Super G mode or 802.11g-only mode (this unit doesn't do pre-11n), disable SSID broadcast, and enable auto channel scan, which selects the best operating channel for the DIR-450. It supports WEP (64 or 128 bit), WPA, WPA2 and WPA2 Auto. There’s no support for WPA2 enterprise, but frankly, in a mobile router, you’d probably never use that feature.
LAN setup is quite straightforward. Out of the box, you don’t really even need to configure it, as the built-in DHCP server is enabled with a default IP address pool of 100 addresses. The router does support DHCP reservation for mapping specific IP addresses to specific computers on the network based upon their MAC address, a feature I really like; the LAN configuration page shows you a list of Host names, IP addresses assigned, and their corresponding MAC addresses.
A click on the Advanced tab reveals that the DIR-450 retains many of the advanced features found in D-Link’s top-of-the-line models, including virtual servers, port forwarding, application rules (for port triggering), MAC address filtering and Web site filtering. As you’ll find in other recent D-Link routers, the right side of the screen displays context-sensitive “Helpful Hints.” The support tab above the hints column takes you to an index page that provides more detailed information about menu items and configuration parameters.
The DIR-450 lacks the quality of service (QoS) engine that’s built into both the DIR-635 and the DIR-655. That makes sense, since EV-DO provides a relatively low-speed connection to the Internet — it's no cable modem — and you’re unlikely to be doing voice or video over those links. I did try a Skype VoIP connection through the DIR-450, and while I was able to connect and hold a conversation, the audio report I received said that it sounded like a bad cell phone connection. That’s not too surprising, considering the latency on the EV-DO network. My ping response time to www.google.com, accessed through the Tools menu, averaged 250ms, compared to the 17ms response time through my cable connection.
Information from http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com
