Trendnet TW100-BRV324

TRENDnet Dual WAN Advanced VPN Router (TW100-BRV324)

A metal box with all the plugs in the back and status lights on the front, the TRENDnet Dual WAN Advanced VPN Router covers the same price range as Netgear. Four 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports, along with separate WAN1 and WAN2 ports fill the back of the unit. The nine-pin serial port for a console connection looks positively nostalgic in today's world of RJ45 and USB ports. The BRV324 advertises support for 70 IPSec and 10 PPTP VPN connections, or 100 pass-through sessions with IPSec, PPTP and L2TP. There's no firewall throughput number published, but the speeds for the BRV324 across two broadband connections are in the same range as all the other units. A color illustrated Quick Installation Guide is included, along with a CD manual and an Ethernet patch cable. Using an IP address range of 192.168.0.1 is just different enough to avoid conflicting with existing addresses. Plugging in our network switch and the first WAN link, then turning on the computer, passed a client DHCP address properly to our configuration computer. Using the browser to log in to the admin screens, we went to Setup and set the WAN connection type, choosing between Static IP, Dynamic IP (DHCP), PPPoE and PPTP.