The old SMC Wireless Barricade Router I have been using at home finally decided to give out. It did survive mostly intact through a lightning strike that fried its’ power supply and I suspect that the strike shortened its’ expected life span. So, I packed up the truck and headed down to the local COMPUSA. I didn’t have time to do much research and why should I? SMC makes fine networking products…

I found that COMPUSA is not big on SMC. They had exactly one broadband router with wireless built in - the SMC2804WBR. No problem. It replaced my previous router’s functionality and added 802.11G as well as a stateful packet inspection (SPI) firewall. No need for simplistic NAT firewalling now!

I paid the nice lady and passed on the warranty. I like to offer this thought when offered a electronics warranty. “So, you think so little of the shit you sell that you are going to do me a favor and sell me a warranty?” That always shuts them down. The really persistant ones sometimes respond with “This warranty covers everything. Suppose Fido pees on it? This warranty will cover that!” Not…

I get home, rip the box open, and plug it in. It powers up - a good sign. What next? Broadband in, configure all the neat features, and… apply the latest firmware. It seems that while SMC has figured out how to allow configuration changes withoout rebooting the router they still haven’t figured out how to save the configuration between firmware patches… So, I reconfigure the router. And… nothing. The lights look good; they are blinking brightly. The cable modem is working. Hmmm… It worked prior to applying the 1.11a firmware. Odd.

And an hour later Google has been kind enough to inform me via BroadbandReports.com that this chicken can’t fly. It has a host of issues. It seem my specific issue is that with firmware 1.11a I can’t actually use the SPI firewall - just the NAT firewall. Or, I can but then the router will lose its’ DHCP address which sort of eliminates the need for the SPI firewall. The previous firmwares suffered from other problems - some bigger and some smaller but the entire line of firmware has been a bag of crap. Plus, the router seems to suffer from minor implosions when doing neat things like playing online games.

The lesson? Do you research before you buy. Simple huh?

A word on the SPI firmware bug: It has been know about since the day that 1.11a was released and it is still not fixed. Perhaps the Indian call center is having problems clearly communicating with the U.S. developers? A language barrier? Maybe SMC just doesn’t care. In any case, that is a pretty serious bug to slip through testing. Seems to me that SMC has some problems with product development and possibly communication and I won’t be buying anymore of their fine products.