Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

These routers come with really poor power adapters that are 1) energy inefficient, and 2) overheat. Notice the reviews for failures; most of them come from power failures. Mine was the same. AT&T oversold it to me when I added a DSL line upon moving to my apartment. The router fried about 1 month after the warranty expiration. The power supply itself is 5.1V ... now, how often do you see 5.1V adaptors out there? As if they couldn't engineer the thing to interchange with a $2.00 5V adaptor instead of shilling for $10 to AT&T for a replacement. More to the point, the wireless network portion is an 802.11g router - meaning it's an older slower technology. If you're going to buy a wireless router nowadays, you should get a faster 802.11n router, which should be back-compatable with 802.11g hardware. Why are they shipping 802.11g routers nowadays when 802.11n has been official since September, 2009, and widely available since summer, 2007? Not to mention, for the money you spend on this router, you could purchase an identical one with 1) print-server capabilites (meaning you could attach a printer to the router allowing anyone on your wireless network to attach to the router) and/or 2) a port for Network Attached Storage (a backup hard drive or media disk you can avoid attaching and de-attaching to your computer). It also doesn't have the, ahem, ease of use that dodge most makers of routers. Compare Apple's AirPort to make the router function as a bridge (basically a way to extend a wireless router by using it to relay or boost the signal from another router). On an Apple router, you click a box saying "enable bridge mode," on this, you enter VPI 0, VCI 35, disable PCI search, change the connection type, and disable routing...and remember to press save. The security settings are really funky. I don't envy DSL providers, as it is a tricky technology, but if you ever want to use a service to connect to your computer from the outside world...forget about it. No VPN, no Slingbox, no Back-to-my-mac, no run your own home server, no dynDNS, no zeroconfig...ok, it CAN be done...but the success reports on google are about as common as good reviews of this router/modem/gateway. Also, if you have a mac, there are frequent reports of hardware compatibility with this router - really, only due to the way-out-there-bizzare default settings. see the discussion at ([...]) By the way, when this fried, I just wanted to get a DSL modem and use my own wireless router (base station). AT&T's next branded DSL modem down cost $70.00 (basically without the wireless network). Now, it had the same specs as another one in the store for $50 that didn't have the special AT&T logo. I got the non-logo one, plugged it in, and it worked perfect. When I did so I discovered my DSL connection was much, much faster. Also, I didn't have any problems with losing my connection every evening at about 11:45 for about 40 minutes without fail. I had this problem when connected to this 2wire router both wirelessly and wired. I am not a conspiracy theorist by nature, but I did study networking and I can't help but think AT&T makes use of this branded router to shape and limit network traffic.