About this time last month, we had our Verizon-provided router die on us. Well, maybe the router itself didn’t die, but I had noticed that the power cable (a standard “wall wart” type) appeared to have warped a bit. Lacking money, I called Verizon to get them to ship me a new router.

That router showed up after a week. Took ‘em long enough, I thought, hooking up the replacement router (while first checking to see if the power cable would fit in the old one…it didn’t). This router somehow completely failed to connect to the internet, after three hours of it attempting to ping the ISP. So another router showed up in two days. This third router succeeded in getting the family back online, at least enough to browse websites and play World of Warcraft (which is really all my parents seem to care about, ‘Net-wise).

Unfortunately, this router being a slightly different model from the previous one, has quite a different web interface than before. It looks similar, and in fact the instruction guides are almost identical, but there are little things that prevent it from being as friendly as the old one.

Little things like, well, port forwarding. This router has absolutely failed to allow me to forward ports for things like serving files outside the LAN, hosting games on Skulltag or Half-Life, and seeding for BitTorrents. In some cases I can’t even join other peoples’ game servers. Even wireless support seems to be dropping the ball, with my XBox 360 being, at times, unable to connect to the Internet at all. This was not the case with the other router. Setting up port forwarding through the front-end proved to be a frustrating experience, even for Malachai, who does this sort of thing for a living. After three hours of fiddling about with it, neither of us were capable of getting my Linux server (Ferretcage) to have any presence outside of the LAN. There goes one of the main reasons why I set the thing up.

I am most displeased with this router, and I am not sure I trust Verizon to provide more. I might as well quit while I’m ahead, though, considering that if I were to get another router, there might be a chance that it’ll have an even more frustrating front-end than this one. Malachai continues to recommend that I buy the same model of router that he uses; that might actually be an option, but I’d need to keep this router around, assuming his model doesn’t have an Ethernet Coax port with which to serve Verizon’s FiOS TV channel guide and on-demand programming. (No idea why the cable boxes aren’t hooked up with Cat5 ethernet or similar.)