I’m on a continuous quest to bring down costs for my clients and part of that involves keeping an ear to the ground for hardware trends that lend itself to reducing installation/maintenance costs of customer premise hardware. It’s as simple as crawling over our supply chain websites and seeing who is offering what. One of the best parts of technology is that what is cutting edge today is yesterday’s news tomorrow. The better part is that once bleeding edge hardware still offers robust performance and a lengthy life span for deployment well beyond year one of its life. We have a sawing in IT/IS, leading edge does not lend itself to industry best performance. In fact, sometimes giving vendors a chance to work out the kinks is your best bet. Typically within 1-2 years of product general availability (GA in geek talk) software matures and security holes are rooted out improving security, as well as, product performance (not to mention price).
Recently at work, we’ve come across a wonderful little router that seems to finally show some positive results for consumers resulting from the Linksys and Cisco merger some year or so back. You take Cisco’s leading edge IOS, VPN, and PIX firewall elements then mix them with Linksys’s low cost small form factor SMB routers. The result is the Cisco 870 series who is not done any justice on it’s own site.
My personal favorite variant is the 871 (who CDW has a great rundown on) which is perfect for Ethernet hand offs (100 Mb/s or less) to an SMB or remote office connecting back via VPN to a larger WAN/central office. The router comes with a built in DHCP server, can perform NAT, has a non-DPI firewall (right out of the ASA/PIX), supports VPN (server or client using IPSec or Cisco Easy VPN), and can be SNMP polled. The result is a beefy edge router for a small LAN connected via an Ethernet hand off (such a metro-Ethernet or xDSL and Cable). Add your favorite Layer 2 switch and you have yourself a decent LAN. There is also a WiFi capable variant and the router can act a WLAN central AP controller when coupled with Cisco APs. That’s good news for SMBs who want secure wireless access or for hospitality users who want to create a “hot spot” for their clients. The product scales well with memory, SSL VPN, and advanced IOS capabilities (if you really want to beef up the unit) when being deployed in a medium-large enterprise environment.
While I’m happy to see Cisco moving a bit down market with products I’m not happy about Linksys’s recent movement with its WRT54G2 revision. In order to drop the price of this residential grade router some twenty US dollars, Linksys/Cisco ditched the external antenna in favor for an internal one. Reach rate changes aside (Cisco claim performance is actually increased over the older WRT54G) the loss of external screw on antenna coaxial connectors means you cannot equip the unit with your own antenna. That type of switch out was a perennial favorite power upgrade for hackers everywhere. Specifically it worked wonders when you wanted a cheap wireless access point to hang off a wired Layer 2 SMB LAN.
The good news is Asus has filled the void with its WL-500gP v2 router. When equipped with 6dBi panel antennas we’ve seen full rate reach at over 300′ with clear line of site. 100′ in real world suburban deployments is possible. The units can be tied back to a hot spot controller of your choice or run via your favorite Linux compressed variant to deliver connectivity and full system control (DD-WRT being my personal favorite).
Not sure how to hook all this up? WVT can design and implement your LAN or WLAN. Drop by our contact page and drop us a line however you please. We’ll gladly setup one of the options above for your business and help with any of your communication needs including network design and upgrades.
