Product:		SMC Barricade Wireless Broadband Router (SMC7004AWBR)
Manufacturer:		SMC Networks
Price:		$229.99 (street price)
Review by:		Marc Zeedar

Want to share your broadband Internet with multiple computers including Airport-equipped laptops? You need a wireless router!

Apple sells the Airport Base Station, a $300 wireless router, but it won't work with wired networks -- it's wireless only.

[Correction: apparently the ABS does support wired networks if you connect it to an Ethernet hub. The Barricade simply has a built-in hub.]

In my situation I have three computers: an old PowerMac 8500, a G4 tower, and a Titanium PowerBook G4. I couldn't easily (i.e. cheaply) add Airport to the 8500, so I needed a wired solution for it. Both of the G4s accept standard Apple Airport ($99) cards.

I already had a router -- Sustainable Softwork's software router IPNetRouter -- which ran in the background on the 8500 and split my DSL connection to all the machines on my network.

I tried running the G4 tower as a software Base Station, but it was inconvenient leaving it on all the time, and sleep often confuse it.

I also had another annoyance: my ISP requires the use of PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet), a horrible thing that makes you dial and log in each time you connect to the Internet. (So much for "always on" Internet access.)

Then I heard about a new hardware router that not only worked with both wired and wireless, but would transparently connect via PPPoE for me! Initially the units were expensive, but when I saw them dropping to the $200 range, I decided to get one.

The SMC Barricade Broadband Wireless Router is a cumbersome name, but the product is impressive. It's small, not much bigger than a couple Ethernet hubs placed side-by-side. It has two antennas for wireless broadcasting and receiving. On the back are connections for the Internet (your DSL or cable modem) and three 10/100 Ethernet ports. (If you need more than three ports, you can attach a standard Ethernet hub.)

There's also a serial port for connecting an external modem (in case you don't have broadband service; it's also handy as a backup if your DSL goes down) and a PC parallel port which acts as a print server (I didn't test that feature as it is only supported under Windows, unfortunately).

Setup and Configuring
Installing your Barricade is simple: you plug the Ethernet cable from your DSL or cable modem to the router, then plug the Ethernet cables from any wired computers. Connect the Barricade's power brick and you're finished.

Configuring the Barricade and your computers is also simple -- at least if you have a simple network. Unfortunately, though SMC claims Mac OS compatibility for their products, their documentation only includes instructions for Windows. If you're using a Mac, you're completely on your own. (SMC does have toll-free technical support, but the guy I talked with didn't know much about Macs. More on that in a minute.)

Fortunately the Mac makes this kind of stuff easy, so you really don't need much in the way of instruction. I worked blindly, with no networking knowledge, and blundered through the process just fine.

First, I saved my existing network settings by choosing and naming a duplicate configuration in my TCP/IP control panel. That way if I messed things up I could always go back to my normal setup. I set the "Configure" popup to DHCP server and cleared all the other fields (left everything blank). That was it! I didn't have to type in any IP addresses or change any unusual settings.

I then launched Internet Explorer. You configure all the Barricade's functions via a web interface: it sounds strange, but it's really rather convenient, and of course SMC doesn't have to do anything special to service Mac users. You simply use a special IP address as the URL for your web browser and the Barricade's login page shows up. Once you enter the password (be sure to change it later from the default), you are able to configure various settings, such as telling the router to use PPPoE and giving it your ISP's login info.

This is the main screen, which reveals the system's status. Here you can see that we are not yet connected to the Internet.

Now we've connected!

There are a number of esoteric settings which I'm sure networking engineers appreciate, but I don't have the faintest idea what they do. Fortunately, you can just ignore them.

It was during this process that I encountered something strange: my PowerMac 8500 could see the initial Barricade web page and even log in, but it could not bring up the page I needed to set the unit up for PPPoE. I figured it was a browser issue: perhaps it needed a modern browser (I had IE 4 install on my 8500). So I downloaded and installed IE 5, but that didn't help: the configuration page would not display.

I finally went to my TiBook and on a whim, tried to connect to the Barricade via Airport. To my astonishment, it worked on the first try! I hadn't changed anything from the settings I had been using with my PowerMac G4 operating as a software base station. Using the TiBook, I was able to log into the Barricade and set it to PPPoE mode and restart it. Once the unit had rebooted and connected to the Internet, I was able to surf wirelessly!

I then went back to my PowerMac 8500 and discovered it was connected to the Internet as well: everything was working perfectly.

Encryption Woes
The only real trouble came when I attempted to enable WEP encryption on the wireless network. (Without encryption, all my wireless Internet traffic would be open for anyone in the neighborhood to read.)

The Barricade wanted a 10-digit hexadecimal password. I wasn't sure what that was, but the ID number of my Airport card looked like a series of hex digits, so I tried that. I saved the configuration on the Barricade and rebooted it. Then on the Mac side, when I attempted to connect to the wireless network, it asked me for a password and I gave it the ten digit hex number. But the connection was refused. It was very strange.

I was forced to call SMC's technical support line. This was late in the evening Pacific time, yet their call center was open. Impressive. I did have to wait twenty minutes or so, but finally a human answered. He was stumped by why the config page wouldn't originally open on the 8500, and surprised the wireless portion worked without any configuring, but since it was working now, we didn't dwell on the issue.

We tried several things to get WEP working, but nothing changed. I was worried I'd been doing something incorrectly, but the technician informed me I was on the right track. I was disappointed and bit annoyed that the tech shouldn't know how to do something as simple connecting a wireless computer with encryption enabled -- it's not like I was trying to do something unusual.

But the tech didn't know Macs, so finally I suggested he have their Mac person call me the next day. (I specifically gave him the hours I'd be home, but of course the tech called while I wasn't there.)

Meanwhile, that evening, I turned off WEP so I could get on the Internet, and did some surfing for solutions. I finally found an obscure reference to the problem which -- in cryptic and incomprehensible language -- explained that PC wireless networks often expect the password in hexadecimal while Apple does not. The solution was incredibly simple: when prompted for the password to join the Airport network, prefix the password with a dollar sign to tell my Mac to transmit the password as hexadecimal. I tried it and it worked perfectly: WEP encryption is enabled!

Transparent Use
Since then, the SMC Barricade has worked just fine. I've had to reset it a few times when the Internet connection mysteriously vanished and I couldn't even connect to the Barricade's URL, but restarting the unit reestablished the network. As of this writing, I've been continuously connected to the 'net, wired and wireless, for five days, and there are no problems waking up sleeping computers and connecting to the 'net. I hardly think about my network at any more: I just grab a computer and expect it to be connected.

While I didn't do any benchmarking, the speed of the network seems faster than it used to be with the software router, and the Airport signal is definitely much stronger: at least one and sometimes two "dots" better than before (the Airport control strip displays the strength of your connection as a series of between one and five lighted dots).

Configuring wired or wireless computers to connect to the network is much simpler than with the software router as you simply set your TCP/IP Control Panel to DHCP and leave everything else blank (be sure to choose Ethernet or Airport as your connection type, of course).

The SMC Barricade also offers built-in firewall security, supposedly blocking outsiders from getting into your network. I have no idea if or how that works (I'm neither a hacker or a network guru, so I don't even know how to test such a feature), but reports on the 'net suggest it works as well as security software packages that purport to do the same thing.

If you're looking for a set-it-and-forget-it router that supports both wired and wireless networks, look no further than the SMC Barricade. Combining low cost with excellent performance, it will give you the freedom to roam.

References:

• Good article explaining routers and network stuff
• Marc's MacOpinion column about transitioning to the SMC Barricade Wireless Broadband Router
• Buy SMC Barricade Wireless Broadband Router at Amazon.com

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