ZyXEL NBG420N 802.11n Wireless Router w/ 2 IPSec VPN Tunnels

Comment: I had purchased a D-link 802.11n router to speed up our home network. It turned out to be very buggy with an intermittent signal that dropped our connection quite often. The signal strength was weak, as well. With very little to go on, I trusted a few of the early reviews out there for this product. Boy am I glad I did. The ZyXEL router holds up very well and produces a strong, *consistent* signal in our house. It has been everything I hoped it would be. The web interface for setting up the router is a bit clunky, but mostly because it prefers to give you access to set-up "wizards" by default, whereas I'd prefer to look at the advance settings first. Once you get used to it, it is no better or worse than any other interface. It doesn't quite shine like some of the netgears of old in this regard, but was at least as good as the D-link I got rid of when this router worked so well.

So, in summary -- I'm a big fan of this router!

Comment: I wish I'd stuck with my old 802.11g Linksys router. That's what I'll be going back to. Before I bought this pricey Zyxel 802.11n router, my wireless printer worked great. I set up the printer once and it was always online. Now my wireless printer mysteriously falls offline repeatedly all day long. I have to reset the printer to get it back online. (No point in having wireless if you have to keep visting the printer in another area of your home or office.) I've tried modifying the re-auth settings and the idle time out settings and the re-key settings--all to no avail. Worse, I can't use my Blackberry half the time if I've got it enabled for Wi-fi and am within range of the Zyxel router. When the router goes through its re-auth cycle (or re-key, I'm not sure which), my device becomes completely unavailable for several minutes, with a little timer clock showing in the middle of the screen. I can't access the OS. I can't even reboot the device. Just now I was unable to make a phone call for 10 minutes. That's 9.5 minutes too long. What if there was an emergency? I cannot access *any* feature on my BB while it reconnected to this Zyxel router. It's basically frozen. I'm going to sell this router and buy another Linksys. Too many hours lost that I can't get back. I'm done with Zyxel.

Comment: I bought two of these routers because they had all the features I needed to link two small offices and had good reviews on Amazon. Before buying, I read through the manual to verify that the VPN tunnels would work with dynamic IPs or at least DDNS. The manual indicated the router was capable of both in the details of the VPN setup documentation (Section 15.2.1 of the manual found here: ftp://ftp.zyxel.com/NBG420N/user_guide/NBG420N_3.60_Ed1.pdf ). The basic setup of the router was pretty straightforward, until I got the the VPN setup. At that point, I attempted to set the Secure Gateway Address to 0.0.0.0 as described on page 182 of the manual (I did have keying mode set to IKE and no other active rules as qualified by the manual), but the router returned an error message along the lines of "secure gateway address cannot be empty". After double checking the other settings, I called technical support and waited on hold for about 20 minutes. I then walked through the settings with the tech support rep (to be fair, he was polite enough), but when I got to the specific issue I was encountering and described what I was attempted to do, he informed me that the NBG420N did not support VPN tunnels with dynamic IPs or DDNS - static IPs were the only option. I stated that the manual said otherwise and he informed me "the manual is wrong". He proceeded to suggest other models for the capability, but at this point I didn't have time to deal with ordering and I certainly didn't have any faith left in ZyXEL anyhow. I planned on returning them to Amazon and searching for an option locally since I needed to have them setup in two days. Since most of the stores were closed by this time of day, I decided to mess around with the router just to verify that it did not have the capability. While I was unable to get past the configuration issue mentioned for dynamic IP addresses, I was able to get it to work properly with DDNS. I feel I was jerked around by both the documentation and tech support, neither of which seems to have been correct. Aside from that, the routers seem to be working. The VPN tunnel does seem to take quite a while to establish (~5 minutes), but this could be partly due to DDNS and bandwidth limitations I suppose. Also, my two old Linksys WUSB54G 802.11g wireless adapters didn't seem to work with this router, they just kept constantly negotiating the connection. Other devices were no problem.

Comment: I bought this to replace the two existing routers I had, one of which provided my VPN connection to work, and the other I used for wireless. After trying to get this to work for many months, I'm giving up and returning to them.

Very simply: The Zyxel cannot maintain a wireless connection for more than 10 minutes. Drop-outs and renegotiations are constant, regardless of firmware update, frequency, signal strength, or device on simple G WPA2 connections. Neither my Squeezebox, Android, nor my Thinkpad could keep a solid connection. All three could maintain a connection indefinitely with my other router. The Zyxel also starts hanging in the authentication phase periodically, where it needs to be powered off and back on again for anything to connect to it.

The VPN connections work, but are very slow. They too renegotiate far too frequently, with 30 second pauses all too common during the day.

In short: save yourself a lot of grief and buy something else.

Comment: Router is very good in the area of range and speed. Still having issues hooking up PS3 as media server to it... however, they have an excellent customer support staff that follows through on any possible issue you may have.

Setup is not as easy as other routers I have used, but it performs like a dream. For the money, the quality is hands down solid and reliable. If my PS3 would connect as a media server I would probably give this a 5 star.