SmallNetBuilder

Introduction

When I was first approached by Xincom to review its Twin WAN router, I asked them to differentiate it from Hawking's FR24 that I reviewed almost a year ago, and which is widely available for about a third of Xincom's price. Xincom's response was that they compare it more to Nexland's pro800Turbo, which can still be found for under $250. (Symantec acquired Nexland back in May of this year and has renamed the pro800Turbo the Symantec Firewall/VPN 200 and doubled its price to about $900.)

Reality lies somewhere in between. The 402's hardware is essentially the same ARM-7 based design as the pro800Turbo's, minus the pro800's backup serial port and substituting a Kendin 8995 5 port 10/100 switch+PHY chip for the Broadcom 5317 8 port switch+PHY found in the pro800Turbo.

The Hawking, on the other hand, uses a more highly integrated design based on the ADMtek 5106 / Conexant CX84200 Network processor, which probably allows Hawking to have such aggressive pricing. The Hawking's four 10/100 LAN ports also are auto MDI/MDI-X, which eliminates the need for an Uplink port or Normal/Uplink switch for port expansion, while the Xincom just skips uplink capability. The Hawking's twin WAN ports are also 10/100 vs. the Xincom's 10BaseT, but given the sub-10Mbps speed of both routers, the Hawking has no real edge here.