Problems Encountered
Firstly, the router continually crashed and rebooted when browsing maps at streetmap.co.uk. You may ask why - the short answer is that ZyXEL could not replicate the problem however, it was later discovered to be a fault with the firmware used during the review (V3.40(FN.5)b3). The second, more significant problem had ZyXEL scratching their heads. After brief periods of inactivity (30 to 60 seconds), the router would appear to go into a "snooze". Although the ADSL connection was never lost, if further data was to be transmitted, a delay of around 1 to 2 seconds was incurred before anything was actually sent or received. When using interactive applications such as telnet and SSH, this became extremely frustrating. For general web and email, users are unlikely to notice any performance degradation. Maintaining a ping stream to a remote host acted as a work-around. I tried the router on 3 different ADSL lines to no avail. Electronic Frontier were extremely helpful with the diagnosis, but at the end of the day, they were unable to recreate the problem at their end. They were convinced the issue was external to the router and not a firmware bug. If anybody else encounters similar problems, ZyXEL would be interested to know |