Apple Airport Extreme and Cisco WRVS4400N Review

I had been planning to upgrade my home network for a while and finally decided to do it over the weekend. On my network was an older 802.11 b/g Apple Airport Express that just wasn’t very useful anymore. Aside from being older, it’s not an 11n device and we just can’t have that, now can we? The bigger issue was that I live in an older house in San Francisco (we’re talking 1908 old) and it’s just not very “wired” friendly. My goal was to move my existing Time Capsule from out of my bedroom (this is the only place in the house the cable modem can plug in without significant rewiring) and into my office. From the office it would connect wirelessly to whatever new device I put in my bedroom to be the router. The idea being that an 802.11n bridge would be a sufficiently fast alternative to running physical cables. With the Time Capsule in my office I would be able to wire my laptop into it directly for very fast Time Machine service. Moreover, my Linux server, which is also currently residing in my bedroom, could move into the office and I could avoid having to put a wifi card in it (it has to be wired in, which is why it’s lived in my bedroom until now).

	Cisco’s WRVS4400N Wireless 802.11N VPN Router

All I needed to make this work was a nice, fast, 11n compatible router to play the role my Time Capsule had been playing. Sounds simple right? So I headed to the hardware store in San Francisco to shop around.¹ I had read about the Cisco WRVS4400N before and it seemed to get decent reviews. I generally go with Apple products, but I thought to myself “Cisco is known for routers and this is a business grade router, it should be overkill,” i.e., my expectation was that I would quickly get it running and then spend my geek time toying with the “business grade” extras that it had to offer. It was about $30 more than Apple’s router, but I’m a firm believer in paying for good hardware so I went with it.

The Cisco Debacle

When I got it home, the nightmare began. I plugged it in and everything worked fine. I enabled administration over wifi and got to work. The basics went smoothly, but the first issue was encountered when changing it from 802.11b/g/n to 802.11g/n. Since I have no b equipment, I thought this tweak would make sense and be harmless. For whatever reason, this made the wifi sloooooooow! I’m talking Egyptian hieroglyph scribe slow. I had to take my laptop physically to the router and plug it in to return to the default b/g/n, which made it speed right back up. Seemed odd, but whatever, I was sure it was just me so I moved on to firmware.

When I think “red tape” I used to think of the government. Now I think of Cisco’s web site process to download firmware. I can honestly say it was the most frustrating site I’ve used in the last year, maybe more. First, I couldn’t just get the firmware, I had to register. And to register you have to provide your life story and create a ridiculous user name and password with all sorts of high security requirements (which there is zero chance I’ll remember). Their site is one of those where every time you forgot to put a special character in your password or whatever, rather than just telling you, it blanks out your form and then tells you. Highly annoying, but whatever, I registered and logged in. At least the pain was over … or not. I didn’t count them, but I would guess that I had to go through roughly 20 different screens to get my firmware (which the router didn’t tell me about by the way, I just knew to check). Finally, after clicking links and buttons acknowledging that I wasn’t a Soviet hitman, shady contractor, or corporate spy, I was allowed to download the firmware. And then, after all of that, Cisco had the balls to present me with a form asking about my web experience. Nice thought, but seriously, get the guy who wrote that form to spend his time cutting the red tape out of the site. But I digress. I got the firmware, installed it and got back to work.

The next step was to enable WDS and have my Time Capsule join so they could operate as one single network. To make a long story short, it wasn’t happening. If you scour the Internet forums you’ll find dozens of stories claiming that you “can” and “can’t” do this, i.e., join Apple and Cisco hardware in one net. Well, add me to the “can’t” column. After about 3 hours of trying every permutation of settings I gave up. I don’t know if the issue was the Cisco router or the Apple, but I knew the Cisco had to die. In the process, I found other aspects of the Cisco router’s admin interface that felt buggy (much like the b/g/n to g/n issue noted earlier). For example, when the router would come online, you could try to connect but it would just reject the password over and over. On roughly the 3rd or 4th attempt each time, it would take it. I don’t know if it was allowing connections too early or what, but I lost my patience with it. It was death by a thousand paper cuts and it just wasn’t worth the frustration.

Apple FTW!

	Apple’s Airport Extreme

I took the router back to the aforementioned store² and they very nicely accepted the return. I walked 2 blocks over to the Apple store and grabbed a new Airport Extreme. I took it home, plugged it in and in about 5 minutes had everything working like I wanted it to. Moreover, I had the pleasant surprise of finding out that the Airport Extreme now operates on simultaneous bands. This means that my fast devices can keep rockin’ the 802.11n speeds even when a slower 802.11g device gets on the net. (Older routers simply drop all devices to the lowest common speed, so you lose performance.) Very nice, and very fast! Needless to say, my satisfaction was very high and I had $30 more in my pocket.

Final Thoughts

I know the argument could be made that if I had bought another Cisco router that it probably would have worked too. And while that may be true, I would have had to forfeit a lot of features, like seamless network backups, wireless printing, and music streaming to name a few. Moreover, most of the features that drew me to the Cisco router I found were available on the Airport Express and just aren’t heavily advertised on Apple’s website. Given all that, I think I would make the claim that the Apple routers are actually better than the Cisco alternatives given that they provide more features, and are cheaper. Remember, the Cisco router I’m talking about is “business grade” model, which means the cheaper alternatives suck more by default. No thanks.

That said, I’m sure there’s a place for Cisco routers (it’s just not my house).

Notes

¹ I do my non-Apple shopping at Central Computers in San Francisco. I highly recommend them. Great selection, fair prices, and the staff is helpful.

² Ibid.

This article was edited after publication by the author on 17 Jan 2010. View changes.