Cyberoam NetGenie
Wireless-n router
By Juha Saarinen, Auckland | Wednesday, 07 December 2011The internet is a great and wonderful experience, but it’s no secret that it can be hostile, offensive and just plain weird too.
How you deal with that can be difficult, especially if you have children. One way to that is unlikely to give you any parental kudos is to filter the family internet connection and to record what people do on the web.
This is how Cyberoam does it with the NetGenie Wi-Fi router.
Setting up the NetGenie is very easy. You can select a number of canned settings based on age to filter traffic, from eight years to adult.
The range of categories is extensive, from nudity, pornography to political topics and ‘hacking’. How these are selected isn’t clear, nor is there a way to measure the efficacy of the filtering, not just in terms of what it should block, but also what it shouldn’t. An antivirus filter is also built into the NetGenie router.
What sinks the NetGenie router is the poor performance. Despite 802.11 b/g/n support Cyberroam says 20Mbit/s is the maximum for the device. This drops to 10Mbit/s with all security services turned on.
In testing, the maximum throughput turned out to be 17.5Mbit/s downstream, and 4Mbit/s up. This was tested on a 70/10Mbit/s VDSL2 internet connection.
For a Wi-Fi router costing $240 (RRP including GST), the low performance isn’t acceptable. Look elsewhere, and try talking to your kids instead of entrusting a device with deciding what they can do on the internet.
Cyberoam is distributed in New Zealand by Snappernet.
This review appears in the December/January issue of PC World.
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I have installed NetGenies where there was a genuine requirement to control inappropriate internet use that was getting out of hand. In this type of implementation the device was very successful. The person reviewing this hardware missed the point completely or had a very weak argument suggesting talking with kids was enough.
One implementation of this device found a young teenager was looking at pornography despite complete and utter denial from that teen that it was happening. There is no secret that the net genie was in operation and when faced with the evidence that they had attempted to visit those sites, they came clean.
Its not about high performance data transfers, its about keeping your kids safe online. I find it interesting they spend most of the article discussing its throughput performance rather than its intended primary features. 20Mbit is faster than the majority of internet connections in NZ so most families wouldn't even notice this reduced performance when security features are enabled. I have never come across a home connection using VDSL, they all use ADSL which is slower again. The router is not going to be the performance limiting factor here.
Should someone want a performance wireless network, they can connect their high spec wifi gear to the Net Genie and still have the benefit of monitoring and restricting internet use. Should they have simple requirements, they can use the one built in.
Whats more, it works across all devices. Including iphones, ipads, ipod touches, Windows PC and MAC
Posted by Kyle Greig at 11:59 on December 8, 2011
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