Did not work as a router or as a HomePlug device. Only worked as a wireless access point.
I bought a pair of these with the idea that I would connect one at one corner of the house to my main internet router and put the other at the far corner of the house to give us full wireless coverage, connecting the two via the included HomePlug Ethernet over powerline.
This was relatively easy to set up (although I could not get the "automatic" HomePlug encryption or the automatic WPS wireless configuration to work and after several attempts did it all manually). It worked in theory (status panel showed 45 Kbps communication over powerline) until the traffic started to flow over the powerline, at which point the powerline connection dropped, taking the whole side of the house out with it. It ended up being pointless to have, so I gave the pair to a friend of mine to see if it would work better in his house. Unfortunately, at his house he couldn't even get the HomePlug to connect at all.
Then I moved to an apartment and tried using just one of them as a regular Wireless Router/Firewall. Unfortunately, just my one computer plus TiVo overloaded the device, causing it to hang and have to be power cycled about once a day. I thought it might be a bad unit, so I switched to the other one. Same problem. It seems that somehow it's management of NAT connections was so bad that its tables were getting overloaded with stale entries.
So, in short, I haven't gotten the HomePlug part to work well enough to be useful and I can't use it as a router/firewall. It did, however, seem to work fine as a wireless access point (not doing NAT/firewall/routing), which is why I'm giving it two stars instead of one. But for that, you can find cheaper solutions.Get more detail about ZyXEL NBG-318S - Wireless router + 4-port switch - Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, 802.11b, 802.11g, HomePlug AV (HPAV) - external.
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