Bountiful Wifi Full Power Wireless Router BWRG1000, Front View
The Bountiful WiFi long range router, model bwrg1000, transmits a full 1000 milliwatts (1 watt); the max allowable power output for an access point.
It features removable Tx and Rx antennas that you can upgraded to higher gain aerials for increased range. Or you can replace them with directional sector, dish, or Yagi beam antennas. These would give miles and miles of point-to-point or point-to-multipoint network links. Two antennas here improves range, speed, and reliability of the wireless connections.
The many front panel LED status lamps provide at-a-glance access to key router function health. We’ve owned the fan-cooled Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 since 2008, and ran it constantly, 24 X 7, on our home network until 2013. While several of its power adapters failed during that time, the router itself worked flawlessly. We upgraded to Wireless AC (the bwrg1000 only supports Wireless G speeds at 54 Mbps). But the unit remains in our computer closet, ready to take over as a backup router, should our current one break down.
These include Power, System Status, WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) Status, WAN (Internet port) status, and lamps for each of the four LAN ports 1 through 4. These LEDs glow solidly and blink, indicating the various statuses that this router can assume during startup and normal operation. See the Users Manual for a complete description of these displays.
To reduce chances of unintentional yet network crippling button pushing, the bwrg1000 has no buttons or switches on the front panel.
Rear panel ports, pictured below, include the WAN, LAN ports 1 through 4 (black), the 5-volt DC power adapter port, and the left and right antenna connectors.
The only push button, found on the unit rear, is the recessed RESET button. So, accidentally bringing down your Wifi by pressing the wrong button, is almost impossible on the bwrg1000.
One antenna transmits (Tx) and the other receives (Rx). The manual says that this arrangement increases wireless reliability.
You can’t buy a router legally in the U.S. with more transmit power than the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000. This router offers a full one watt of transmitter power.
This router talks using the 802.11b (11 Mbps) and 802.11g (54 Mbps) wireless protocols.
Our copy ran almost constantly for five years without problems, except for the external power supply. We had to replace this several times But aside from taking it apart a couple times to blow out the built up dust inside, the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 router needed no other maintenance.
Works with Windows, Android (Nexus, Samsung, Amazon Kindle), and iOS (iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch) mobile devices, so long as you can tolerate the slower-than-N Wi-Fi speeds here.
All Ethernet ports on the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 support 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps Ethernet speeds. No gigabit Ethernet here.
You can save the current router settings to a file on your computer, and restore it if you later must recover from faulty changes to the router.
When enabled, you can access the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 remotely from anywhere on the internet. Disabled by default for increased security.
WiFi Multimedia (WMM) Quality of Service (QoS) prioritizes network traffic among connected devices and the internet according to built-in rules. Non adaptive QoS. No settings for this here, except to enable or disable it.
You can use the Telnet terminal services client to access the admin functions on this router. Legacy support.
The fans help keep the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 quite cool. Needed when run at full power.
Can be set as a wireless router (the default setting), or a wireless access point. The router function provides…
Access point mode turns off the NAT, DHCP, and firewall functions. It provides you a good quality WAP when you already have these services running elsewhere on your local network.
IEEE 802.3 WPA, 802.11 b/g only. No 802.11n or 802.11ac. The age of this router shows, in its lack of support for the state-of-the-art standards of 2019 and beyond.
The wireless network has enough range / reach to work well throughout medium and large homes when running full WiFi power.
Has a wireless repeater. So the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 can function as a WiFi range extender in a WDS (wireless distribution system). Functions in this mode as either a repeater or as one end of an Ethernet bridge (wireless client).
The built-in firewall supports port forwarding, service / application blocking, blocking by schedule, and keyword in HTTP blocking.
This router can block wireless devices attempting to access it, via their specific MAC addresses. Disabled by default.
You can bypass the firewall on the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 and allow direct internet access to a specific DMZ (demilitarized zone) local computer.
RADIUS support for WPA and WPA2.
The Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000, though a very solid router, lacks many of today’s state-of-the-art wireless technologies such as MIMO, Wireless AC, Secured WiFi by default, and gigabit Ethernet.
The dual fans make some noise you can hear ten to fifteen feet away. They should have created a quieter router. Even a full power router need not use noisy, dust-attracting fans. Bigger heat sinks instead of fans is a much better option.
The Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 came out before WPS protocols grew popular in wireless access points and routers.
The two small muffin fans run constantly at full speed. Yes, they do prevent overheating. But they make for a very dusty router. Plus, full speed fan running may not even be necessary when you choose lower power settings. Had they used bigger heat sinks inside or along the side and / or back panels, they could have eliminated the noise and failure risks of the spinning fans.
Heavy whip aerials give greater signal range. But on the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 router, they tend to flop over if you bump the router, no matter how tight you screw them into the back panel SMA connectors.
The Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 provides a single-band access point, operating exclusively on 2.4 Ghz. So, given how crowded 2.4 Ghz. is getting, you may see reduced WiFi performance over time. This is more likely the case if you run lots of Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, or microwave ovens in your space. But the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000’s high power output coupled with some longer whip antennas, seems to overcome even the “loudest” sources of 2.4 Ghz. interference.
Initially, all wireless security protocols are disabled. So the default wireless networks are not secure. While this unit is capable of WPA2 authentication and encryption protocols, they must be activated manually via its web interface.
This router never provided automatic polling for new firmware versions. They always had to be installed manually, and required a computer to do so.
Apparently, the Bountiful WiFi company has gone out of business. So, there haven’t been any new firmware version released since 2008.
We had to replace the 5-volt, 4-amp power adapter for our Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 several times, at some expense. Fortunately, the first time or two it failed were covered under the warranty. The next two times, we bought replacements on eBay. But then, we found some used laptop adapters that featured a 5-volt 6-amp output. After soldering the Bountiful power connector from one of the failed original adapters, onto the laptop supply, we never again experienced power supply failures with the bwrg1000.
You cannot attach a USB hard drive or thumb drive, to share with other devices on the same wireless network.
So, no load balancing between different WANs (wide area networks) on the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000.
Should a firmware upgrade be interrupted or some other cause of firmware corruption occur, there’s no means to restore the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000 to its previous, working firmware. Note though that while you can’t restore the firmware itself, its settings can be restored. Of course, you would have had to save a backup of the router’s settings somewhere.
The fastest this router handles data is 100 Mbps (Fast Ethernet).
In fact, No MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) at all. The documentation makes no mention of this feature. It uses multiple antennas, radios, and ultra-fast processors to support many users at the same time, without stutters, drop-outs, clicks, and freezes. True. This unit has two antennas. But only one transmitter and one receiver (one on each antenna). So this is not true MIMO, in which each antenna functions as both a transmitting and receiving areal.
You can create up to four different WiFi networks on the Bountiful WiFi bwrg1000. But none of these works as a guest network which would allow clients to access the internet but not other devices on the local network.
You cannot directly connect printers or storage devices to this router directly for sharing on your local wireless network.
As long as IPv4 is still widely used throughout the Internet, this router will still function. However, widespread adoption of IPv6 will render this device obsolete and virtually useless.
The Bountiful WiFi WAP (wireless access point) and router was a reasonably priced and excellent-performing wireless G network solution among the several that we’ve owned. We were pleased with the purchase, and are sorry that the Bountiful WiFi company didn’t build upon this technology with next generations.
We really like the long wireless range and reliability, as well as the intuitive web-based admin pages. These give you precise control over tens of router settings for overall behavior and function.
The network systems pro would welcome this router’s plethora of advanced settings and options. Yet the novice will like the built-in online help documentation and how little one must learn to set this up and tune it for best performance in his own network.
Bountiful WiFi built this router well, to satisfy beginners and experts alike. The full power output assures that you’ll get very reliable wireless network function for wireless G devices. So we rate this router at 94 out of 100.
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