Homeportal - fancy but maybe too fancy
Written: Nov 15 '02
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Pros: Flexible - wireless, homepna and ethernet routing. Fast. Lots of status screens and options
Cons: Used to be good tech support, no longer. Freezes up.
The Bottom Line: Nice feature filled product that I see selling cheap these days. Tech support has gone down the tubes. Units appear to be fragile.
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| tfharper's Full Review: 2wire HomePortal 100 (1000-200002-000) Gateway |
I had a homeportal 100, worked like a charm for about six months. I used the wireless portion, which had weak coverage - it was in one bedroom and I was in another with a wireless laptop, maybe 35' away, two walls, I got a medium level signal and 4mb/s connection rate. The homepna stuff worked better than I thought though. Ethernet routing and gateway speeds are tops in this category as measured by a couple of technical reviewers. Solid firewall with stateful packet inspection.
My problems showed up a few months later when summer came. The room the homeportal is in isnt air conditioned and by the end of the day the sun is on that side of the house. Inevitably by 9pm when the room temp peaked the homeportal would freeze up. Its reputed operating temp is well above that and heck, I have a full blown server running in the same room that I only have to reboot when installing new hardware or software.
To their credit, after a few emails back and forth 2wire sent me another one. That one worked great for about four months. Then it periodically would drop the broadband connection and wouldnt reassert it until I power cycled the router. Broadband was there, no problems...in fact once I was working on a pc right next to it, had web pages, then bam, none. Looked over, homeportal broadband light out, cable modem had all the lights on. Power off/on, good as new.
After this happened 3 times in a week, wrote an email to 2wire. A few email volleys later they "authorized" me for a new firmware upgrade. Hmm. Its supposed to do that automatically. The email "authorizing" me said something about my being granted access to this upgrade for free as it fixed a problem. Hmm. So in the future maybe I'm supposed to pay for upgrades when I paid a premium price for this premium router? I dont think so.
Anyhow, the router got better but still did its freezing broadband trick, only half the time. I had supplied the detailed logs to tech support via email, there were some funny messages and errors in there that i'm sure meant something to them, but not to me. After a few more volleys, the email guy told me to call tech support.
In other words "I dont know, but I can buff you off on someone else and go take a long lunch". I called tech support. 30 minutes on hold. Asked for all the same stuff. No conclusion. Must be something wrong with my broadband/cable modem/cable.
Which is why I bought another brand router which has now been working for many weeks without exhibiting any problems. Apparently the cable modem saw what happened to the 2wire unit and decided to behave better.
My theory is that all this economy going south stuff is whats affecting tech support. Lately I just cant get decent support whereas up until last year I usually got pretty decent support. Companies need to wake up and realize if you give crappy support, customers will buy someone elses product. Then they'll go out of business. Smart move on the "cost savings" by cutting the customer end of it. Try whacking a couple of dozen overpaid vice presidents instead...
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 199
Driver Availability: Windows, Linux, and Mac
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Epinions.com ID:
tfharper
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Reviews written: 35
Trusted by: 2 members
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