Billion BiPAC 7300NX ADSL2+ router review

In the box, you’ll find the router itself, along with the power adapter and a single Ethernet cable to get you going.

The router has four Ethernet ports, the DSL phone cable port, and USB port for the 3G modem.

A number of 3G modems are supported, and users can find an updated list on the Billion website.

It offers WiFi b/g/n support with speeds advertised up to 300Mbps.

Naturally, it also has security in the form of WEP or WPA/WPA2.

For the sake of brevity, a full spec sheet can be viewed on the Billion website.

Setup

Setting up the 7300NX was quick and easy. Simply click on the “Quick Start” option and follow the prompts, filling in the necessary details.

The setup process will prompt you to select either ADSL or 3G as your primary mode of connection.

If you select ADSL you can set 3G as a failover/failback (after the initial setup procedure), though it doesn’t appear that you can have it the other way around.

Also included in the setup is the option to enable or disable WiFi and its security. Both of these are enabled by default, with the security protocol set to WPA/WPA2.

Users are again reminded to change their default router passwords (it’s not part of the “Quick Setup” procedure).

Billion BiPAC 7300NX

Browser UI

The in-browser UI is a simple two pane layout offering menus, sub-menus, and options on the left, and settings, toggles, and switches on the right.

There are two screens: Basic and Advanced.

The “Basic” screen offers you status information and quick access to WAN and wireless settings, while “Advanced” allows you to configure and manage the more technical aspects of the router and network.

The “Basic” screen is easy enough to navigate. The same can not always be said of the “Advanced” screen where an option may be obscured beneath oddly-named sub-menus.

In use

The big question is: how does it fare in day-to-day use. The short answer: not great at all.

Wired connections worked well and there were no complaints to be had there. Switching connections between 3G and ADSL was also fairly easy.

However, there were some big problems.

On occasion, the WiFi connection on devices would drop. Not on just one, but on all of them.

Fiddling with the settings, you’ll notice that WiFi doesn’t auto-select the channel it operates on, it defaults to “Channel 1” (2.412GHz). Changing this to auto-select fixed the problem for a while, but it returned and the only way to fix it then was to force the router to re-apply the settings either by restarting it, or by going into the router settings.

Having your WiFi stop working every so often is pretty irritating, especially when mostly working on wireless devices.

As if this wasn’t enough, there were times that the 7300NX decided to reset settings to their default.

Sometimes it would just be a few, but there were times where it just reset everything.

One of the critical things on the “Sometimes” list is the router password that would reset to its default (“admin”).

Simply put, this kind of behaviour is unacceptable.

Conclusion

The 7300NX comes at a recommended retail price of R1292.75, which isn’t terrible, but it isn’t exactly pushing the limits.

However, even if it were to be priced substantially lower than that, I would still not recommend it to anyone.

This is not the router you are looking for.