Product Reviews

This year has seen a number of large Far Eastern manufacturers moving into Europe with big designs on the small to medium business networking territory. Planex signaled its intentions for the switching market a few months ago with the release of its low-cost FMG-24K Gigabit switch and now Comtrend comes in with an impressive portfolio of broadband-related products. The CT-535 is one of an extensive range of multifunction routers and amalgamates an ADSL modem, four-port Ethernet switch and 802.11b wireless access point.

Build quality is up to the likes of D-Link and SMC, but the price tag for the CT-535 is much lower than these companies' equivalent products. The unit provides a full range of indicators

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across the front panel and the fixed wireless aerials can be folded down out of the way if not in use. An RJ-45 serial port at the rear may be used for initial installation over a terminal emulation session, but Comtrend doesn't provide a female RS-232 converter plug so it's much quicker to point a browser at the unit's default IP address. The web interface is simple to navigate with a tidy row of menu options to one side where you can add your ADSL account details and check the connection at the simple line-status window.

The CT-535 provides a fine range of security features. The WAN port is protected primarily by NAT, but you also get a stateful packet inspection firewall - a feature you wouldn't normally see at this price. You can supplement this with packet-filtering rules, although don't expect a great deal of help from the supplied documentation. Statistics on firewall activity are also limited to a list of dropped packets.

Basic 64- and 128-bit WEP are provided for wireless security along with MAC address filtering, but SSID masking isn't supported and there's no status screen for viewing connected wireless clients. An unusual option is the ability to create MAC address filters that apply to any port on the router, although this is of limited value to most small businesses.