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 Nexland ISB Pro800turbo    
A Wolf in Sheep Clothes
(Review by MS, February 10, 2002)
What it does and what it doesn't do...

Normal Mode

The ISB Pro800turbo allows for different modes of operation in dual WAN port mode. The Normal Mode sets load sharing. For a single client, this doesn't make a difference, since the maximum download speed of any of the two ports cannot be exceeded, in other words, two ports won't get more than what a single port would get since one user cannot be connected to more than one WAN port. On the other hand, if multiple users are on the LAN side and simultaneously requesting data, the load balance will kick in and distribute the separate users over the two WAN ports to get the maximum speed. Please note that I don't have multiple cable connections available to test this, the description is a synopsis of the manual:


Any single download on the network will not be able to exceed the maximum bandwidth available on a single WAN but the overall effect of this binding is that the entire network will experience vastly improved performance. The more computers you have, the greater the performance increase you'll notice ...

To rephrase, if gaining access speed or faster pings are the goal, the ISB Pro800turbo will not show any improvement over a single WAN port connection.

Backup Mode

In Backup Mode only one WAN port is active at the time while the second port is kept idle, however, in case of the active connection going down, the second port will take over 100% of the load. In addition, the ISB Pro800Turbo offers backup via serial port that can be connected to an analog or ISDN connection in case everything else fails.

Serial Port and Dip Switch
ON the back (or front, whichever way you want to look at it) a serial connection allows to hook up to a standard external modem for backup purposes via the Null Modem serial connector cable. The dip switch can be used to disable DHCP and to enable firmware upgrades.

Binding of Hosts and Clients

Not relevant for the standard user but in the corporate business a very valuable asset are the capabilities of binding specific clients to predefined IP addresses on the LAN side as well as assigning hosts to one or the other WAN port. This is of particular relevance for servers hosting different domains with both http and ftp clients since the different accounts can be separated by WAN port.

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