USB Mobile Broadband Router
The concept of a mobile broadband router is quite appealing, especially if it supports popular USB modems and enables Internet connectivity sharing over a private LAN. I had cast a quick glance at the Edimax 3G-6200WG but my past experience with products in the Edimax range didn’t boost my confidence enough to consider a purchase. Today, the Incredible Corruption offered a deal on a comparable device that was too good to pass up (the less ZAR 600 applies until 3 May):
The DOVADO UMR (USB Mobile Broadband Router) has a rather interesting capability for users of the NeoConnect Prime device – this is a phone with a USB connector and is connected to a single PC. To share that Internet connection, the PC must be setup to share the Internet connection. With the DOVADO UMR, the NeoConnect Prime device can be connect directly to a router, permitting the Internet connection to be shared with both wired and wireless devices. Think about the extra use you could get out of that ZAR 999 per month uncapped broadband… Other than the Neotel device, the UMR supports a wide variety of popular USB modems, including the Huawei E220. The list of supported devices is rather extensive.
The packaging includes the router, a power adaptor, aerial and excellent user manual. Attaching the aerial to the router is a simple exercise of screwing it into the back of the device.
Attach the power adapter and you’re ready to connect.
The router features four LAN ports, one WAN port and two USB ports, and it’s a wireless router to boot. The WAN port can be used for a conventional connection from an iBurst modem or similar.
Plug a compatible device into the USB port and you are able to configure fail-over – that keeps an Internet connection up if the primary connection fails by switching to the 3G network. On the road, a small workgroup network can be easily setup and Internet connectivity provided by plugging in a compatible USB modem.
Setup of the device is a breeze, helped in part by one of the best user manuals I’ve seen in quite some time. A wizard in the web-based administration environment guides the user through a couple of important setup options – these include changing the default administrator password and changing the wireless network’s ID.
Changes to settings require a restart of the router. Once a USB modem has been connected to the UMR, the Internet connection is automatically enabled. Other than entering specific settings for the service provider one has subscribed to, I found the setup absolutely simple and very fast. A three minute upgrade of the device firmware provided overview information of the connectivity status and even includes an option to send an SMS if certain data usage thresholds have been reached.
The DOVADO UMR works exactly as advertised. It’s probably one of the easier ways of getting a workgroup network up and running including Internet access, firewalling and the usual networking configurations that may be required.
Though the two USB ports may provide the hope that printer and disk sharing is possible, that is unfortunately not the case. Two USB ports are provided simply to supply sufficient juice to the attached USB modem. It is in this department that the Edimax router wins. Based on information from the DOVADO support site, printer sharing is not being considered as a future development, though no word is provided on the possibility of disk sharing.
If the disk and printer sharing is not an issue, the DOVADO UMR comes highly recommended, especially considering its compatibility with a wide range of modems including the NeoConnect device.
UPDATE: my query to the DOVADO tech support mail address has been promptly answered: seems we can expect mass storage support on the USB ports in a future firmware upgrade.
Hey man! Great SA tech-blog! I actually saw this same ad last week and was also intrigued. I have a NeoConnect Prime Unlimited package and thoroughly enjoying it…except when I want multi-user access. Im just about to move into a new place and was thinking about the networking involved – not too intricate, but definitely involves ensuring that the computer the NeoConnect unit is connected to is on whenever access is needed.
How would you connect to the net with the UMR, then, say if it was switched on and I had my laptop connected to it? If the unit was connected directly to a computer, u would have to launch the NeoConnect Manager from within Windows, and then click on the Connect button to dial in. How would this work?
Anyway, I just visited the Dovado site, and it seems that SMS alerts and home automation are also possible, the latter being with the addition of TellStick (only in US…dunno what similar technology we have here in line with this)
thanx! great article once again. hopefully IC can run that special again soon.
sorry, meant Sweden…not US
Thanks for visiting! All you need to do is to update the UMR to the latest firmware and attach the NeoConnect to the USB port. The firmware contains a protocol that dials automatically and keeps the connection up and running, so there is no need to launch any connection software from any machine. This is similar to plugging in a 3G modem: the UMR dials as soon as the modem is ready and the Internet connection is available to the connected (wired or wireless) devices. All you need to do is to configure wireless security options and decide what systems have access.
There seems to be one issue with the Neotel connection: if the phone times out or has an issue with the connection, there is no way of affecting its operation from the UMR. The phone needs to be reset. I’m not sure whether there is a solution for the UMR, but this is obviously an issue with the Neotel device, not the UMR.
The TellStick stuff looks interesting, though I’m not sure that the uplink speeds in SA over any available connection are sufficient to be useful.
Hello all,
The TellStick device works with the DOVADO UMR for wirelessly powering off and on appliances within the home with the proxy of wireless wallplugs. The SMS functionality cannot be utilized by the DOVADO UMR together with the Neotel “modem”, however you can remotely control the TellStick via the HTTP interface, and also by scheduling. You can read more about that here: http://www.dovado.com/tellstick
To see which USB modems offer SMS functionality in the DOVADO UMR, please see our list here: http://www.dovado.com/modems
Thanks,
Team DOVADO
support@dovado.com
Can you setup iTunes Server on this?
I don’t think this is the right device to do that, until the mass storage support comes out. In any case, the firmware does not support iTunes library sharing yet, and may not include such functionality even in the new firmware For iTunes library sharing, use a modern mini NAS, such as the Drobo.
Hi, I need help in configuring the DOVADAO UMR to connect via the iBurst desktop modem to allow multiple connection, would you by any chance know the exact steps to take to configure this? please keep in mind that I don’t have any public IP addresses from iBurst..
Thanks
Don’t have exact instructions, but you should be able to get it to work quite easily by configuring the following (I’m taking this off my Netgear’s setup): does your ISP require a logon – select Yes. ISP – select iBurst or Other. Supply your iBurst user name and password and let the router dynamically receive both the IP address and DNS address. That should be it… Your other users would connect directly to the Dovado using wireless or a cabled connection. No need for a fixed IP address from iBurst unless you have a specific requirement for that. If so, you may want to consider DynDNS or a similar service.
The latest Dovado 4GR Router with Wireless-N and Gigabit wired is now available in South Africa.
my wireless router at home overheated when i used p2p heavily for 24 hours for the next 25 days ..
wireless routers are very necessary nowadays because we do not want so many wires running around the home “*”
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