Review on 🔒 ProSafe FM114P Wireless Firewall with 4-Port Connectivity by NETGEAR by Devon Leach

I have quite a bit of experience with Linksys BEFSR series broadband routers, Netgear MR314 and now FM114P. Of these, the FM114P wins on almost all fronts. Overall I liked the Linksys range as it had some nice features including port mapping and UPnP support that Netgear products don't have. On the other hand, they also have random hangs and don't do Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI). SPI is becoming increasingly important with the rise of denial of service attacks and port scanning bots. After a particularly frustrating week of rebooting the Linksys router twice as often as usual, I decided to give the Netgear MR314 a try (note: the same routing hardware is found in all xx31x models). I was a bit disappointed at first about the loss of port forwarding and UPnP support, but at least the router was reliable (no drops) and the WiFi range was excellent. After downloading the latest firmware from the Netgear website, I checked out what else they had for sale and saw the FM114P model, which I hadn't seen in any of the local stores. I picked up the 314 the next morning and bought the 114 from CDW purely for the SPI firewall capabilities. I was pleasantly surprised that I got a lot more for the extra [money] it cost me. The first thing I noticed is that 114 is faster, and not just a little bit faster, it's MUCH faster. This surprised me as I didn't think any routers were significantly slowing down packet flow, but I immediately noticed pages loading faster. I can't say that throughput has increased, but latency (the delay between clicking a link and the page beginning to load) has definitely decreased. I suspect this is because the 75MHz 114 processor completes registration, security, and routing processes in significantly less time than other brands/models of unspecified embedded hardware. In my opinion routing hardware should and will evolve in the future by using a real embedded processor. The 114 is also better than the 314 with a detachable antenna, stateful firewall, built-in print server, better service configuration (still no UPnP), and more security options. This device is ideal for connecting and protecting a "home broadband network"; with or without cable.