ZyXEL P660HWP

The ZyXEL P660HWP is a sophisticated ADSL router with some valuable additional capabilities that might provide a solution in some otherwise difficult situations.

Price from: £85
WAN: 1 ADSL 1/2/2+ (RE ADSL)
LAN: 4 10/100, NAT
VPN: pass through only
Firewall: SPI, DSI, DMZ and keyword content filtering
WiFi: 802.11b/g+ MIMO WEP/WPA/WPA2
Additional ports: Built in power line networking
Power Supply: Internal
Power Consumption: 5W typical

The ZyXEL P660HWP is an interesting WiFi router because it offers a range of sophisticated options bundled with built-in powerline networking. Of course the real question is why would you want powerline networking at all? After all, even its name “HomePlug” makes it sound as if it's just for fun. Despite its name, however, powerline networking is another useful networking tool in our armoury.

Powerline networking makes use of existing mains wiring to transmit an Ethernet format signal. In many ways it is a return to the original shared media networking concept. The advantages are that it is fast – up to 200Mbps – and reliable - being hardwired. It is also more secure in the sense that you are making a remote "wireless" connection but without broadcasting your data outside of the building. This isn't strictly true as the signals do leak out of the internal mains wiring and into the public cabling but usually not very far. Indeed HomePlug networking might not work between devices powered by different ring mains within the same building and certainly won't work between different phases of the same supply. In short the system works well within a single area of a single building. To make security even better than WiFi HomePlug systems always use encryption and clients have to be set up with a shared password.

The P660HWP has HomePlug AV built in and all you have to do is connect the unit to the mains in the usual way. Any clients that are going to connect to the router, the rest of the network and the Internet, using HomePlug need a suitable HomePlug AV adaptor. Notice that AV does not interwork with HomePlug 1.0 and, even though the P660HWP is certified as a standard HomePlug AV device, to be certain things work you probably need to use ZyXEL HomePlug adaptors for clients. The status screen tells you how everything is set up and most of the parameters can be changed simply by clicking on the existing value and entering a new setting.

The unit itself is quite large with a built-in power supply and a great many status lights. Even more information is provided via the web interface including how much bandwidth is being used by a range of standard services – FTP, HTTP etc.

In use the P660HWP is fairly easy but once you move beyond the setup wizards there are a range of options that are more challenging. It does attempt to detect the parameters of the DSL connection and all you have to supply is user name and password for a PPPoE or PPPoA connection.

Configuring the router