Linksys LRT214 Business Gigabit Wired VPN Router

Easy to install and set up, although I have set up many routers. The load balancing function provides faster speeds when I want to download a lot of data. I just link my smartphone via another router.

Price wise this is a decent router but there seems to be a number of issues. Specifically, I just couldn't get the EasyVPN feature to work at all although old fashioned IPSEC VPN's seem fine if slightly more complex to configure. Also had major issues with DHCP with certain devices simply refusing to pull addresses from it. Eventually I had to disable DHCP on the Linksys and use another device (my Synology NAS) as a DHCP server and then everything started working as expected. For many users, however, DHCP should be a "it just works" feature and its alarming that something so basic would be unusable in a device from such a major vendor. The most worrying aspect of these issues is that Linksys haven't updated the firmware for nearly 10 months which does seem to imply that they are not really actively working on the problems with this device.

Acquired this router a week ago. On the positive side setup was a piece of cake, VPN configuration easy, nice features (Local DNS, Dual WAN, SPI firewall) BUT after just a few days issues started to appear. SIP Phones on our network couldn't ring any more, OpenVPN was slow and buggy and most of all the router started freezing up every evening and needed a cold restart every morning. Tried several factory reset / firmware upgrade / ... but no success Not really fit for a business that relies on its connectivity. Switching to a Cisco RV325.

The dual WAN feature works very well and is very easy to set up. Obviously, you will need two external modems of whatever flavour you require to operate in dual WAN mode. I use it for load balancing and fail-over, both of which are seamless. I have gone from two unmanageable LANs with separate broadband (7Mb/s) connections to a single LAN with what looks like a 14Mb/s broadband connection. I no longer have to manually reconfigure everything when a broadband connection goes down, the router fails to the working WAN connection and can send a notification email if required. Otherwise it is a router/firewall with all the features you would expect to have. I particularly like the ability to have MAC/IP address binding and the ability to only permit pre-registered devices access to the network. Physical attachment to the network is not longer good enough security. This means that employees cannot used there own devices without explicit permission by whoever controls the router. A future-proofing feature is that you can run a dual IPV4 and IPV6 stack so assigns IPV6 IP addresses as well as IP4. The only lack of flexibility of this device is the sharing of the WAN2 interface with the physical DMZ port, but there are other ways around that limitation so I only knocked of 1 star for that. UPDATE: I think this is dying after only two years service. Will not sustain connection on second WAN. Seems to be related to flash memory as I cannot save certain settings. Came back after a full hardware factory reset. Replacing forthwith with another brand, this becomes the spare. Docked 2 more stars for reliability. There are much better options available now.

Fast throughput. I'm using with Virgin 350mbit router and am seeing up to 350mbit throughput. Not as fast in VPN Mode. Not as easy to setup port forwarding as (say) a Draytek or Netgear but it can be done in the end!

After the death of my elderly FVX538 I’ve been looking around for a reasonably priced SOHO firewall (after finding that most of the FVXs’ for sale had the same fault as the one I already owned)". Paid for a 24 hour delivery and it promptly arrived about 12 hours later leaving me a rather heavy small box. The RJ45 sockets being at the back and, rather strangely, the indicators, being at the front but on top (this could be a problem if you only have a restricted space and like to be able to check the status LEDS regularly). And so it was time to configure it. I normally use a notebook to preconfigure before connecting a router to my network. This led to the only problem and I found that I couldn’t run the set up wizard (screen size is to small to see the full setup screen). No problem, I configured it all by hand and about 15 minutes later it was up and fully working on the network. Other than having to reboot the tablets and phones no problems at all.

Does exactly what we needed. I t is our entry point to a BT leased. VPN works fine....

Works well and a great price

Simple interface. Working well