Residential Gateway with NAT and spi firewall

I have At&T dsl and they gave me a modem that's a residential gateway. It does have NAT functionality and sp1 but is it as good as a $100 Linksys router? I don;t trust it, it's a Motorola 2210 netopia. Anyone know about this?

 

Nat is Nat. The simple difference is in firmware that allows the options for you to do what you want with the firewall. In all honesty the only reason I spent $150 on my new Linksys router was.

1. I needed Wireless N
2. It needed to be compatible with the 3rd party firmware I use.

 

They're fine...as said above...NAT is pretty much NAT..yeah you get get fancier featuers, PAT, with better grades..but on the Linksys models it's still just NAT.

SPI is overrated, home grade routers only have the most basic of bare minimal SPI features...not really a big security factor.

The fact that your PC is hidden behind NAT, by default all 65,000+ ports are blocked on the incoming direction..that's what counts, your PC is hidden on a private IP address.

The little Moto units are barebones in features...but for most users, that's not a problem. Unless you run a larger home network, or a business network...where you demand more robust and granular port forwarding features and ACLs and other firewall changes...the little Moto will suit you fine.

 

Netopia/Motorola is a trusted xDSL vendor. Probably one of better ones ( as compared to the cheap chinese junk ).

The question is how much traffic do you have ? NAT functionality is same in Cisco and Netopia. Only difference is Cisco are made for handling high enterprise loads. While Netopia can handle not more than 10000 packets/s.

So choose according to your load profile.

 

Netopia did make awesome DSL hardware back in the day. Commonly used in business class DSL setups (prior names were Cayman). Solid units.

With the whole company changes between them, Motorola, and Siemens Speedstream, the products have lost their identity pretty much. This product is pretty much the same as the Speedstream 4100/5100 series. Just in a silver case now instead of black.

If enterprise loads are expected...since ISPs ship this "home grade" unit for residential accounts, clearly the wrong class DSL was ordered, as they don't use these modems in their higher business class offerings.