@madpilot makes

With my move to my new house/office, and with Amnet offering static IPs on their ADSL 2 plans it has become time to retire my trusty Alcatel ADSL modem and WRT54G modem/router combination. I went through this process about a year ago when I blew the power supply on my WRT54G and was not impressed with the quality of many of the routers out there. Instead, I modified another power supply and got a UPS (I learnt my lesson)

Anyway, my luck hasn’t changed. Amnet offer a Siemans SpeedStream 6520 with their accounts, so I thought I would give it a go. As far as I can tell, this modem/router is only being offered by Telstra and Amnet as a package and as a result, you can’t purchase it from a retail store.

Problems:

• The router doesn’t seem to handle persistent connections well. If I open an SSH session, it will often drop out after a period of inactivity – using the PuTTY “keep-alive” feature fixes the problem, so it isn’t the quality of my connection. The same occurs with my Outlook IMAP connection. Very annoying.
• It doesn’t support port forwarding beyond DMZ – not a huge problem, but I liked this feature of the WRT54G
• For some weird reason, my VoIP software – eyeBeam, can’t connect through the firewall. It’s little brother, X-Lite works fine, but eye-Beam is so much better I’m quited annoyed at this. Note this may not be a problem with the router, but it worked fine with the WRT54G.

I’ve asked for a refund for it and have ordered a Linksys WAG54Gv2 which is the combination big brother of the WRT54G. Hopefully Linksys is on other winner with this product. I’ll let you know.