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(More customer reviews)We had high hopes when we tried the Zyzel G-4100 out in a coffeehouse and a motel as a hotspot router. The integrated printer seemed really convenient, and the router promised all sorts of powerful security features. And it had this really cool look to it - sort of like Hal from the movie "2001."
Come to think of it, maybe its resemblance to Hal ("I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that") should have been a warning to us, because this product isn't delivering. As the manufacturer admitted to us, a single user running BitTorrent (and LOTS of users try to run BitTorrent at public hotspots) can crash the router. So can a significant load from just a few users running other network-intensive applications. The printer will, at random times, not produce a ticket, requiring a reboot of the router. At other times, the router's internal Web server crashes, so we cannot even log in to control the router. Guests at the venues have complained and staff have gotten extremely frustrated. The router often has to be rebooted once or twice daily.
We don't have access to the internal source code of the product, so we cannot pinpoint the bugs. However, the crashes appear to correlate with the number of connections to the outside world that have been made in the past 5 minutes. (Note that your browser can make a dozen or more connections just to fetch all the parts of one Web page.) Too many, and things start to go wrong. Not always immediately, but eventually. Probably due to a "memory leak," an uninitialized pointer, memory corruption, or some other error in the router's programming.
We contacted Zyxel tech support, and they told us that the device "wasn't intended for heavy loads." (I'd hardly consider a few users in a coffeehouse to be a heavy load, and even if it were the router should certainly handle the situation gracefully and not crash.) They finally suggested that we put a second router behind the hotspot router to take some of the load off it. Is this something one should have to do with a router that sells for around $500, especially when the same load won't crash routers that sell for a tenth of the price?
Bottom line: Zyxel simply will not own up to the fact that their firmware has bugs and needs fixing.
We then contacted a colleague who does Internet in hotels and resorts. Turns out we should have called him before making the initial purchase. He said that his company had sold off more than 100 of these routers because they were a constant source of trouble. He also told us that these routers very often blow out their power supplies. (He thought that the power supplies shipped with the units either were of poor quality or weren't rated to supply enough current for the device, and recommended that we substitute one with a higher current rating.) Indeed, we had a power supply fail on us; we thought it was a chance occurrence until we spoke to him.
We really want to keep using this product, because it has a lot of features we like. But unless Zyxel quits making excuses and comes up with stable firmware that's sufficiently robust to operate a real life public hotspot, we're going to have to eBay it and find something that works. Or maybe build our own. We could homebrew something quite nice for the same $500 or so.
I hope to be able to update this review one day to say that Zyxel fixed their bugs. But at the moment, all we can say is that we don't recommend buying this product. It crashes, it freezes, and the manufacturer denies that anything is wrong. Save your money.
Click Here to see more reviews about: ZyXEL G4100 802.11g HotSpot Service Gateway With 3 Button Thermal Printer
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