Hawking Technology H2BR4 Dual WAN 4-Port Firewall Router

I bought this because it seemed like a real bargain and would allow me to take advantage of 2 DSL lines. I had many issues with the network going down after one day, the router not responding to HTTP, etc. I finally disconnected it. Well, I decided to open it up and did some research. I found that the H2BR4 uses the identical board as the Planet XRT-402D and the Edimax BK-6524K. Only those are hard to find and cost more.

I upgraded to version 1.42 of the XRT-402D firmware and got improved reliability. Feeling adventurous, I upgraded to version 1.44 of the Edimax BK-6524K firmware. Inspecting the firmware images for the H2BR4, XRT-402D, and BK-6524K revealed that they use the same firmware written for the BK-6524K. You can find these alternative firmware on the Planet and Edimax websites.

I finally found the bargain I was looking for. This product would have received 5 stars had Hawking Tech shipped it with version 1.44 firmware.

Perhaps I got unlucky, and hopefully others will review this, but the one I received was either broken or poorly designed.
It would release and renew the IP lease every 60 seconds on my WAN connections. This meant any persistent connection would be lost every minute. If you happened to be playing an internet game it would go poof every 60 seconds. Not a very useful thing to have. There was no way to tell it to stop doing that either. Perhaps I had a bad one and am in the minority. I'm hoping others post reviews so I can find out. I'd love to have one of these but the next cheapest Dual WAN router is $200 by XinCom.

Hawking provides no tech support. Only old firmware for this router is available on their website; the actual current version is 1.44 but you can only get it if you email them and badger them. If either WAN disconnects, the router enters an error state in which it will fail to provide DNS service, which means you cannot browse anything outside your local network. The router configuration software provides NO mechanism for forcing a reconnection if a WAN drops, and the router will not attempt to reconnect a dropped WAN port until its TLS (Time to Live; typically about 12 hours) has expired. The router claims to provide DDNS (dynamic DNS) support for DynDns.org, but it does not work AT ALL. Protocol and Port Binding fails to work entirely. When the router enters the error state, the ONLY way to revive it is to reset it to the factory-default state and then reconfigure it from scratch. I've had this router for six months and it has basically failed to operate properly for more...Read more