How bad is Billion?

D

DaveSemm

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For a few months now, my ADSL connection has been slow and unreliable, and disconnected frequently. I decided to try a newer router - my Sitecom is 3 years old - and bought a Billion N73X today. The reason I chose it is that it has an option to plug in a 3G USB stick - that could be handy, but isn't essential.

When I first turned it on, my PC couldn't connect to any of the LAN ports (which is required to set it up). I tried 2 other PC's, but they all said the media was disconnected & the LAN lights on the router didn't come on. After turning it off and on a few times, the LAN eventually worked. I was able to get into the setup web site, and configured WiFi and ADSL, and everything worked fine - for 1/2 hour. WiFi stopped working, and when I plugged the LAN back in, that also didn't work again. After turning it on and off a few time, it worked again for a while.

So is this a dud, or are all Billion products flakey? I'm wondering if I should return it for a replacement, or should I try a different brand?
 
Billion products are solid. Sounds like you have a bad unit.

My router has been running solid for years :)

Multiple devices on wifi etc
 
Mine is 3 years old and still running perfectly, you just have a faulty unit, take it back and replace it with a new one. ;)
 
My Billion router has been the most reliable piece of networking equipment I have, its even taken a direct hit from lightning about a year back, and all that's broken is the 1 LAN port. Everything else works 100%. However I have found that my specific unit, the BiPAC 7300RA is a tad tricky to setup with regards to the advanced features, but definitely doable. Just have your unit swapped out.
 
I love Billion! Very reasonably priced and solid units, very easy to set up and use.

Only downside is that there is not much support for re-flashing them with DD-WRT! :D
 
I tend to prefer billion over the other cheaper brands... which in my experience with them, they tend to handle 100's of client P2p connections in a natting table much better than most of the cheapies. And they are resiliant, my old 74xxnx has survived two seperate voltage surges on the ethernet... killing 3 of the 4 ethernet port. And yet it works perfectly. In fact when mother-nature one day finally gets round to finishing off what she started, I definitely get a another billion to replace it.

Another plus they are very configurable... via the web interface or telnet you can easily setup up more advance configurations with multiple adsl account and using its static routing tables you can easily route traffic on different accounts. Plus there's some nice simple MIB info + setups for graphing you connections with Cacti / mrtg if you want as well.

Sounds like you may have gotten a bad one...
 
Thanks everyone, I will take it back and get a replacement. I saw some bad comments on the forums here, so I thought maybe its a bad brand (it is my 1st Billion). But it looks like I can give Billion another chance.
 
Just to add to what the others said, I'm on my 2nd Billion. First got taken by lightning (missus didn't disconnect the phone line) - it still works fine as a router, the adsl port got taken out. I know how to configure them as I want them.
 
Ok, I got a swap out, and it is fine. The problems I had with the 1st unit included sometimes not being able to connect to a LAN port, sometimes not being able to connect to the configuration web site, everything runninging perfectly and then getting disconnected from the LAN, and having a successful connection on one PC, and when connecting another PC, every PC got disconnected. It was a miserable experience.

I've had none of these problems with the new unit. After configuring it and using it with one PC, I've now added 2 more PC's, and they can all see each other and the internet, and have not been disconnected from the LAN or from the internet via ADSL.

I'll be monitoring it closely over the next few days. If it carries on working well, I will be very happy with it. Kudus to Matrix Warehouse for swapping it out without any trouble.
 
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