After hearing a lot of good press on the Cisco e4200v2 router, I thought I would pick one up and see how it compared to my dgl-4500.
One of the features I liked about the e4200v2 was that it had two separate radios and antenna arrays - allowing you to have connections in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands simultaneously.
I thought that if I was sufficiently impressed, it would replace my dgl-4500.
That did not happen.
While I like the "look" of the Cisco router, and I loved the dual radios - the thing that ultimately turned me away from it was the web interface.
The Cisco user interface gets the job done, but that's it - no bells or whistles.
Things that I have become accustomed to - on my dgl-4500 were glaringly "missing" on the e4200v2.
On the Cisco router, whenever you changed DHCP reservations - it released/renewed ALL IPs for all clients - which affects any current communications - (like a vonage voice call !!).
QoS was weird also - kind of reminded me of the Netgear setup - only even less-evolved.
If you wanted to apply QoS based on a MAC address, you had to type it in manually - there was NO dropdown list of currently-connected devices for you to select from. Very annoying and draconian - quite a disappointment considering this is supposed to be their flagship model.
Logging was another shortcoming. Cisco's logs were next to useless - and in a font/format that you had to resize its (popup) window to see all the line items - plus it broke them out into categories of information that you had to manually look at one at a time. Shameful.
As far as signal power/strength - the Cisco was comparable to the Dlink - so this was not a differentiator - except for the fact that the Cisco could run both simultaneously - where, for example, you could have N using 5GHz and G using 2.4 GHz - something the dgl-4500 can't do.
Status information was also sorely lacking. There was no way to see which wireless clients were connected, what band they were connected on, the wireless signal strength, etc . . . NOTHING !
I have come to appreciate my dgl-4500 a lot more after this experience. I like the "extras" that DLINK has provided in their user interface that really gives you a very good grasp on what the router is seeing and doing.
When my 4500 does finally die, I will be hard pressed to find a worthy successor. I have had bad luck with the dir-655 in the past, and also the dir-615 (the logs are not the same as on the 4500 - they are just machine code instructions or some other garbage).
In any event, if a killer-router from d-link hits the stores soon, I'll try it out - as I DO like the dual-radio feature a lot, but I can't sacrifice the bells and whistles that I have become used to with my dgl-4500.
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Topic: Picked up a new Cisco e4200v2 router (Read 4625 times)