While I can't recommend the Hawking Tech FR24 Dual WAN router (see my earlier posts here, here, here, here, here, and here) I hear from some people about an reported problem with throughput. Apparently, some people are having problems with the FR24 locking up and these users feel the cause is an inability of the FR24 to handle the bandwidth of their speedy cable modems.
But, as far as I know, no one has a modem running at over 9Mbps! SmallNetBuilder did a review of the FR24 and found a transfer rate of 9.4Mbps. I figure that's fast enough for even the fastest cable modem service anywhere in the U.S.
Having said that, the FR24 still has a bunch of problems. Let's recap what I had. First, from what I understand, it will load balance your two connections only if the connections are from the same provider using the same DNS. If, like I did, you are using two different providers acting as a fail over, you are out of luck for load balancing. Second, even if you have two connections from the same provider, the balancing to the second connection will only occur if the request to the connection is coming from another computer on your network. Hence, your computer will not see any speed increase, but someone else on another computer will not be slowed down by your network activity. Finally, setting the FR24 to bring online the second connection only when the first goes down did eventually work but was not reliably so. No matter how I tried setting it up, the FR24 simply failed to consistently switch over, even if I unplugged the primary connection, the FR24 would sometimes fail to switch to the secondary.
To be fair, I understand that there have been a couple of firmware updates. Whether these fix the problems with lockups and automatic failover I can't say. Perhaps, some weekend when I have the time I'll hookup the FR24 and see if it works more reliably than it did before.
Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!
