Cyberoam NetGenie

The internet is a great and wonderful experience, but it’s no secret that it can be hostile, offensive and just plain weird too.

How you deal with that can be difficult, especially if you have children. One way to that is unlikely to give you any parental kudos is to filter the family internet connection and to record what people do on the web.

This is how Cyberoam does it with the NetGenie Wi-Fi router.

Setting up the NetGenie is very easy. You can select a number of canned settings based on age to filter traffic, from eight years to adult.

The range of categories is extensive, from nudity, pornography to political topics and ‘hacking’. How these are selected isn’t clear, nor is there a way to measure the efficacy of the filtering, not just in terms of what it should block, but also what it shouldn’t. An antivirus filter is also built into the NetGenie router.

What sinks the NetGenie router is the poor performance. Despite 802.11 b/g/n support Cyberroam says 20Mbit/s is the maximum for the device. This drops to 10Mbit/s with all security services turned on.

In testing, the maximum throughput turned out to be 17.5Mbit/s downstream, and 4Mbit/s up. This was tested on a 70/10Mbit/s VDSL2 internet connection.

For a Wi-Fi router costing $240, the low performance isn’t acceptable. Look elsewhere, and try talking to your kids instead of entrusting a device with deciding what they can do on the internet.