April 1999

Price: $2,100

Motorola routers, and the Vanguard series in particular, are regarded as some of the most stable and most penetrative networking products in mainstream use. Routers as a product group have some inherent difficulties, and are often complicated to install, expensive, poorly documented, and lacking in features. If a mainstream manufacturer made a router that solved many of these issues and offered enhanced services as well, that would be something special. Enter the Vanguard 6425.

The 6425 is an entry-level router that stands out for its voice-over-IP (VoIP) cards, H.323 compatibility, inexpensive price, superb documentation, and GUI-less interface. Although it is one of the better SOHO routers on the market, we tested it primarily for its Internet telephony functions. Technically, it's a VoIP-enabled router, but for the SOHO proprietor, its pricing and feature set make it as worthwhile as any small-scale fax- and H.323-enabled gateway. Our testing focused on the IP capabilities.

INSTALLATION & DOCUMENTATION
Sometimes, we combine these two sections of a product review, and it's not just because we're such believers in convergence. Instead, we combine them when the units are so intertwined that we would be remiss in discussing one without mentioning the other. The 6425 is one of those products: Its documentation is not one, or even two or three manuals. There is an entire CD containing what at first seems like one .PDF file, but when maximized, users can see all the manuals - about three dozen of them. Part of this massive manual set is because the CD contains data for the entire Vanguard series, but even the parts that are directly related to the 6425 are screaming in need of a good editor. We found too many inexcusable errors, spread throughout too many files, for these books to be truly useful. However, we were impressed with the vast amount of screen shots, glossaries, and explanations. An interesting touch is that several of the manuals include reader response cards.

We were fortunate enough to have a Motorola engineer at our disposal to help with the installation. If we didn't have his help, we would have spent more time reading the aforementioned manuals than actually installing things. Like many products, installing the hardware is not difficult, involving some simple cabling and removing the units' covers to install the VoIP daughter card. Both FXO (which requires a source of dial tone, normally from a PBX) and single/dual port FXS (which supplies its own dial tone) cards are available. To eliminate integration issues that are not the fault of the 6425, we prefer to conduct VoIP testing using the FXS cards, which also eliminates the need for even a line simulator. Also, to minimize confusion, we tested the units using analog ports, but cards are available for T1, E&M, and frame relay ports.

Configuring the software is another story. In the laboratory, we have equipment and knowledge that makes using a command line interface (CLI) easy when using a terminal emulator or a Telnet session. But the 6425 is supposed to be an entry-level product, and it's hard to imagine, for example, a salesperson in a branch office trying to configure vocoders and jitter buffers by reading a voice relay manual written for MIS personnel. Even with the Motorola engineer available, we were still overwhelmed by the sheer amount of customizable options, but the CLI was easy to navigate once we learned its basic commands. Eventually, we learned to tinker with the options for basic gatekeeping, like tracking call length for billing purposes, and enabling user conditions to call or not call certain numbers. We also chose our favorite vocoder for testing, which is G.729.1 at 6.3K. (For future use in the real world, we're optimistic that ATM, fiber optics, cable, or some other high-bandwidth solution will reign - in which case, we can test gateways using a preferable vocoder like G.711 at no compression. Until then, we use a more reasonable vocoder like G.729.1 as a lowest common denominator for comparing gateways to each other.) In total, installing and configuring each router took about an hour.

FEATURES
The 6425's feature set is extensive. H.323 compatibility is one of the 6425's best features, along with built-in fax protocols, a small footprint and an affordable price. The open-architecture unit runs on a multiprocessor PowerPC platform, and provides support for legacy protocols (like TPA, NCR BISYNC, TCOP/TBOP, TNPPx, Siemens HDLC, etc.), SNA/IBM protocols (like 3270, SDLC, SDLC conversions, and V.25), and quality of service (QoS) factors like packet classification and prioritization.

Other QoS features include dynamic bandwidth allocation, dial-on-demand, and classifications based on a packet's source address, destination address, source port, destination port, and applications protocol. Physically, the units also feature three expansion slots, two serial ports, a 10BaseT port, a cooling fan, a Motorola 860 PowerPC RISC processor, three 68302 processors, 4 MB of flash memory and 8 MB of RAM. Still other features include:

• Multipoint and ISDN connections.
• RemoteVU video support.
• Optional remote dial-in/back-up.
• Frame relay annexes A, D, G.
• X.25 switching.
• OSPF.
• IP multicast.
• AppleTalk, TCP, UDP PPP, IPX support.
• Multiple vocoder families.
• "Vanguide" software building application.
• SNMP management.
• Flash/DRAM expansion ports.
• Data encryption.
• CLI with context-sensitive help.

OPERATIONAL TESTING
While one half of our VoIP testing process is qualitative, the other half is quantitative. For this second portion, we use Hammer Technology's Hammer IT VoIP suite to measure packet latency and speech quality across a controlled, ideal 10BaseT Ethernet LAN. Our results for the 6425 came to 132.2 ms of packet latency, measured during 100 test calls. Considering the other functionality of this device, along with its router functions' intent, this latency figure places the 6425 in a slightly better than average position.

For speech quality, the results were again slightly better than average. The Hammer IT suite uses ITU Perceptual Speech Quality Measurements, from which agreeable results for black box gateways tend to score 2.5 or lower. Those scores are very good audible quality that rivals POTS scores. PC-based gateways tend to score 3.5 or higher, sometimes scoring as poor as 5 or worse. Again, the 6425 fell in the middle as it's more than a black box, but not quite a PC. The scores were 3.68 for children's voices, 3.21 for adult males and 3.18 for adult females. Other compression algorithms fared better, but those algorithms were Motorola-optimized and probably would not fare as well across a WAN, especially with H.323 devices and fax traffic factored in.

We were also impressed with the functionality of Motorola's ApplicationsWare. As a series of middleware support systems for everything from VoIP to multimedia and video to the most obscure networking protocols, it seems like there isn't a feature that the 6425 router doesn't support.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
We have nothing but praise for the 6425's price, feature set, reliability and design, but its configuration, VoIP performance, lack of scalability, and complex documentation make the package only adequate - even for a solution designated as entry-level. The learning curve is steep, even for someone who already has router knowledge. Also, many of the features that currently exist only in Motorola's higher end routers (like greater scalability and rack mounting) could be useful here as well, because there is a definite trend toward SOHO locations needing increasingly industrial-scale equipment. Of course, we dread the consequences of a "computer-savvy" SOHO user trying to work on any kind of router, especially one that's so complicated in nature.

CONCLUSION
Despite our criticisms, we feel that this product's feature set, price, support, and reliability more than compensate for its overkill in documentation and steep installation/learning curve. Once it's in place and working, we doubt that it would need much support anyway, and for features like IP fax, VPN-based VoIP, video, etc., it is a decent performer with great features at a bargain price. For this, we bestow the Editors' Choice Award.