Router Upgrade: Cisco to Airport Extreme

My home network is probably a bit unusual. There’s a ton of things connected to it:

• Lutron Lighting (all my lights are fly by wire)
• Control4 (lets me control audio/video/lighting/temp/etc. from various wall pads or my iPad/iPhone
• An AppleTV 1
• An AppleTV 2
• Two AppleTV 3’s
• 2 Tivos
• Roku
• Various “smart” receives (they’re not smart)
• Various TV’s with their own Internet support (which rarely if ever gets used)
• Lots of PCs and Macs
• various Kindles and iOS devices
• Other stuff I haven’t thought of

Our home rack is jammed full of junk. And all of this was ultimately connecting through a consumer WRVS4400N V2.  It was too much for it and it showed through flakey network connections, lost packets via the Internet, etc.

While it technically supported 802.11N, it didn’t support 5Ghz which is supposedly faster.

First impressions:

Pros: Airport Extreme over Cisco WRVS4400N

• Much faster. About twice as fast as the Cisco was in throughput on a wired connection
• No lag/lost packets.  I’d gotten to the point where my ethernet connection ping time to the router was about 2ms.  That’s pretty bad. 
• Ping to router is now <1ms, no lost packets
• Support for SNMP which lets apps get router level statistics (like seeing who’s eating up all my bandwidth)
• Slick Mac/PC/iOS utilities for managing it.
• 5Ghz N support
• It just “works”.  The Cisco was flakey. It had a lot of goofy “security” features that did nothing but cause problems (IPS, goofy firewall).

Cons: Things I miss from the Cisco WRVS4400N

• No web admin page. This is a bummer because I have to install the Airport utility to do anything.
• Can’t block domains.  This is a bummer. I used this feature to keep my kids from going to certain site during certain times of the day
• No access control. I also used this a lot with my kids. I could keep their gadgets from working on the net during certain times of the day via their MAC address
• No easy way to see who is currently connected to it. Makes various diagnostics harder.

Overall

At the end of the day, reliability and performance trumps the various complaints I have.  The AirPort Extreme just plain works. I was really surprised how easy it was to get working.  By contrast, the Cisco had to be configured relentlessly to function properly (have to disable IPS every time it resets itself).