Cisco Linksys E4200 Maximum Performance Wireless-N Router Reviewed

[Mangusta1969]

E4200 Feedback

well... has anyone good or bad experiences with this router, in the next week it becomes available in the netherlands and when there is no better choice i will buy this one to replace my dir825 rev b

About three weeks ago I replaced a Netgear WNR834Bv2 811g wireless router with the E4200. So far, I am very pleased:

a. Easy setup using Cisco Connect software on my Macbook (OS 10.5.8)
b. Significantly better range than the Netgear unit. My E4200 is accessible on all three floors of a 9000 square foot Victorian house; the E4200 is located about 75 feet horizontally from the Victorian house on the ground floor of the of a separate building.
c. Good throughput results and range. I typically have 5.6-5.8mbps speed on the 5GHZ band when my laptop is located within 20 feet of the E4200. I have 5.2-5.4 mbps speed on the 2.4GHZ band when my laptop is located about 90 feet from the E4200, but is within the E4200's line of sight (just two dual pane windows in between the two units). I have 1.2-5mbps speeds on the 2.4GHZ band throughout the large Victorian house on all three floors and through three to eight walls. The throughput does reduce as the number of walls and/or floors is increased, but connectivity has been maintained despite an overall transmission path length of 250 feet or so.
d. No reboots required to date; the unit has gone through two AC power failures and come up fine both times. One of these winter power failures actually knocked out my surge protector, but the E4200 was unhurt.
e. No dropouts during use or connection delays or failures to connect when first activating a wireless connection from a PC or a Mac
f. Easy setup of guest accounts with more limited access and a separate guest password.

I am using the original firmware in my unit (Ver 1.0). The E4200 is supporting both G and N clients, three Macs and two older PCs. I have a 6mbps DSL connection from ATT.com as my internet service. BTW, for the throughput speeds I am reporting here, I have been using the utility at http://speedtest.vudu.com/cdn1/

 

[aleicgrant]

New E4200 need help

hi everyone

First off, I will admit I am a hobbyist at best when it comes to networking, wireless etc. However I think I have enough knowledge to be dangerous as well.

that said, I recently retired my WRT610 to a friend after very enjoyable service. So far I think the e4200 is a worthy upgrade but have a weird problem.

with the 610, I was always able to get exceptional wifi with my iphone. Speedtest app routinely put me well over 15mb (I have 45mb down and 5mb up service)

with the e4200, it ranges from less than 1mb to 6 or 7 tops.

I have a tried a variety of combinations but nothing seems to yield the results the 610 gave me.

I have an intel centrino 6300 wifi client and even with 2 antennas (getting a third) that gets well over 30mb in speed tests.

I am not expecting the 2.4ghz to obviously match or even come close to the 5ghz performance but why such a loss going from the 610 to the e4200

thanks for any help/suggestions.

P.S. I have Bright House Networks with a docsis 3.0 cable modem

 

[matthelm]

So, any word on when we'll get a matching AP/Bridge? I'm in a rental, and can't add wires.

Or can I get 2, and use one as a bridge? (don't want to spend that much!!!!)

 

[ferrocene]

So, any word on when we'll get a matching AP/Bridge? I'm in a rental, and can't add wires.

Or can I get 2, and use one as a bridge? (don't want to spend that much!!!!)

I read in the review that this device can't be bridged. But as an extension to matthelm's question, what would be a good bridge to pair with this device? Is there any?

I read the TRENDnet review here, and that looks like the most promising.

 

[NetworkGenie]

E4200 Running Hot?

Has anyone has an issue with the E4200 running hot like the E3000? I used to have an E3000 running my home network until it overheated and died on me, a little concerned the new design will suffer from the same ventilation issues.

 

[Mangusta1969]

E4200 Longer Term Reliability Issues

Well, my longer term usage of my E4200 is not as rosy as I reported two weeks ago. Over the last 4 days, I have had to reboot my E4200 on a daily basis to restore normal performance.

During this period, my signal strength (as reported by my Macbook Pros IStumbler.app application) has dropped off by about 10db, from about 42dbm to 32 dbm. Since my noise floor has remained constant at about 16-18dbm, the reduction in signal strength on the 2.4GHZ band has been accompanied by more and more marginal performance. In some cases, the signal strength has been reduced to the point where my distant Macintosh clients could not re-establish connectivity with the 2.4GHZ RF band and a router reboot was required.

In each case, when I have rebooted the E4200 (by cycling AC power), the signal strength increases to the original 40-42dbm level and excellent performance and decent wifi range are restored. Obviously, daily reboots of the router are not very acceptable.

Has anyone else noticed this problem of decreasing range/signal strength and then loss of wifi connectivity with the E4200? I am operating in a mixed environment of two PC and two Macintosh laptops, with the PCs operating at a short distance from the router (10-35 feet) and the two Macintosh clients operating at a distance of 100-240 feet from the E4200. This may be a router overheating issue, but my E4200 is just warm and is not hot to the touch.

I do have some other 2.4GHZ networks in the area, but their maximum signal strengths are typically at the 23-26dbm level, as reported by the Macintosh's IStumbler application. I am operating on a 20MHZ bandwidth channel on Channel 1 (2412 MHZ), while the neighbor networks are on Channel 11 or Channel 6. I have setup my Cisco E4200 to only operate on Channel 1, but I may change that to allow it to establish its own channel in order to avoid interference from other wifi networks.

 

[klas]

So, it's been over a month for me and I am generally happy with E4200 and I did not run into issues with needing it to reboot or getting hot. Most importantly two things that been bugging me with WNDR3700 such as stalled browser and buggy DHCP has not been an issue. Although, the range has been enough for my needs, I do have this weird issue where no matter how far I am from the router I get below 2 MB/sec transfer speeds between QNAP Nas and Envy 14 laptop. I didn't have time to troubleshoot the issue much because it's not a huge deal, but that was the only thing.

Since I am still within 90 days, I am waiting for Buffalo dual band router to appear for sale WZR-HP-AG300NH and compare it with E4200. Hoping that we'll see review of it soon as well.

 

[Mangusta1969]

So, it's been over a month for me and I am generally happy with E4200 and I did not run into issues with needing it to reboot or getting hot. Most importantly two things that been bugging me with WNDR3700 such as stalled browser and buggy DHCP has not been an issue. Although, the range has been enough for my needs, I do have this weird issue where no matter how far I am from the router I get below 2 MB/sec transfer speeds between QNAP Nas and Envy 14 laptop. I didn't have time to troubleshoot the issue much because it's not a huge deal, but that was the only thing.

Since my last reboot about 20 hours ago, my E4200 has been running flawlessly. I just ran a speed test (located on speedtest.vudu.com) and have a sustained 4.688Mbps download speed on my 6Mbps ATT DSL connection. This is using channel 1 on the 2.4GHZ RF band, while my MacBook laptop is located in a separate building about 125 ft and two house walls away from the E4200's location.

When I previously tested the E4200 with my laptop located several feet away from it, I recorded 5Mbps speeds on both the 5GHZ and 2.4GHZ RF bands, so I am probably limited to that speed by my ATT DSL connection.

 

[fro]

Can guard interval be modified on E4200?

I've configured the 5 GHz radio in my E4200 to be n-only, and have a number of dual-band n devices that support short guard interval. Does anyone know how to do that? The router's wireless configuration page doesn't even have an "advanced" tab, and asking Cisco for help didn't lead anywhere useful.

I can tell the guard interval is set to the long (800ns) time right now because when I move my devices close to the router to ensure RF conditions are ideal, the best speed indication I see is 65 Mbps. If SGI is set, then that value will be 72 Mbps. I've seen this on other routers, but neither my old WRT610N nor the E4200 seem to be configurable, even though their WiFi Alliance certificates show they are capable of supporting SGI.

http://certifications.wi-fi.org/pdf_certificate.php?cid=WFA9933
http://certifications.wi-fi.org/pdf_certificate.php?cid=WFA6232

I doubt this will make much difference in day-to-day usage, but thought it'd be fun to see if there's any incremental improvement in throughput. In theory SGI should increase throughput by ~12% or so if no other bottlenecks exist.

Thanks!

 

[Unregistered]

Well, my longer term usage of my E4200 is not as rosy as I reported two weeks ago. Over the last 4 days, I have had to reboot my E4200 on a daily basis to restore normal performance.

During this period, my signal strength (as reported by my Macbook Pros IStumbler.app application) has dropped off by about 10db, from about 42dbm to 32 dbm. Since my noise floor has remained constant at about 16-18dbm, the reduction in signal strength on the 2.4GHZ band has been accompanied by more and more marginal performance. In some cases, the signal strength has been reduced to the point where my distant Macintosh clients could not re-establish connectivity with the 2.4GHZ RF band and a router reboot was required.

In each case, when I have rebooted the E4200 (by cycling AC power), the signal strength increases to the original 40-42dbm level and excellent performance and decent wifi range are restored. Obviously, daily reboots of the router are not very acceptable.

Has anyone else noticed this problem of decreasing range/signal strength and then loss of wifi connectivity with the E4200? I am operating in a mixed environment of two PC and two Macintosh laptops, with the PCs operating at a short distance from the router (10-35 feet) and the two Macintosh clients operating at a distance of 100-240 feet from the E4200. This may be a router overheating issue, but my E4200 is just warm and is not hot to the touch.

I do have some other 2.4GHZ networks in the area, but their maximum signal strengths are typically at the 23-26dbm level, as reported by the Macintosh's IStumbler application. I am operating on a 20MHZ bandwidth channel on Channel 1 (2412 MHZ), while the neighbor networks are on Channel 11 or Channel 6. I have setup my Cisco E4200 to only operate on Channel 1, but I may change that to allow it to establish its own channel in order to avoid interference from other wifi networks.

I've noticed this kind of behavior with my E4200. I've got it about three weeks now. This behavior happens with a dell vostro 1520 I use for my job. I also have two macs at home and they seem to be fine since the connect to the 5Ghz signal. My iphone 3g that only connects to 2.4Ghz presents this problem just being two meters from the router. For me, seems like this only happens when using the 2.4ghz band for N connections. I didn't have this problem with a Linksys G router 3 years old though.

 

[Jheroen]

I've had the E4200 for a day...

could not get my siemens 470IP to work, also the usb option to just connect 1 disk and don't work with a simple USB hub disappointed me.
i sent the thing back and still use my DIR 825 rev B.

the only thing i mentioned is that the lan wan speed was higher than with the dlink.
i got a speedtest download result wireless from 119.5 Mbit/s with the E4200.

with the Dlink it's around 80 Mbit/s max wireless...

the dlink also offers more options then the linksys, you can use dhcp and also reserve 1 IP adress for a specific app.

 

[klas]

It was fun while it latest, but I jumping off the E4200 ship (mainly due to a an issue with my IP cameras not reconnecting) and getting on board of Asus RT-N56U and possibly RT-N76U if it comes out soon.

 

[RamGuy]

I don't like the sound of this, why can't anyone just release a high performance router that actually manage to work for extended periods of time without any hiccups?

Has Linksys / Cisco released any firmware updates as of yet or are you still running stock firmware? Stock firmware never seem to get the hands on things so might see some improvements there.

 

[klas]

No firmware updates since release. Check out Asus, it's surprisingly pretty good

 

[RamGuy]

I'm holding of until we see something 3x3 from Asus, and hopefully it will get third-party firmware support because I do not trust Asus stock firmware any more than I trust Linksys / Cisco firmware from experience.

We've got Asus RT-N16 at work and the Asus firmware wasn't much to write home about, but it was really easy getting DD-WRT running on it and it's been darn stable since then.


But if rumours are true and the Asus RT-N76U will spot about the same hardware as the Linksys E4200 I highly doubt they'll be have much different when running third-party firmware.

 

[klas]

Asus RT-N16 did not get stellar reviews. Not sure about firmware yet, but RT-N56U been running stable. See RT-N56U discussion.

 

[TheBrandon]

FYI- http://homecommunity.cisco.com/t5/Wireless-Routers/e4200-has-major-issues-losing-packets/td-p/384327

Can anyone confirm if they are losing packets? Tested on stock firmware and the newly release firmware (3-7) w\ 2 devices, multiple modems.

 

[thiggins]

I didn't see anything unusual in the router performance tests. High packet loss would cause high throughput variation and/or slow throughput. The glitches shown in the IxChariot plot are more due to the small size of the test file relative to the very high routing speed.

 

[claykin]

No firmware updates since release. Check out Asus, it's surprisingly pretty good

New firmware was released on March 7th.

Cisco Consumer Products

Product: E4200

Classification: Firmware Release History

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT:
- The safest way to perform the firmware upgrade is to use a wired computer.
- DO NOT power cycle the Router during the firmware upgrade process.

===========================================================================
Last Release Date: March 7, 2011
Firmware version: 1.0.01 (build 10)

- Fixed 2.4GHz wireless unstable issue
- Disabled IPv6-to-IPv4 Tunneling feature to improve Interoperability

===========================================================================
Release Date: Nov 14, 2010
Firmware version: 1.0.00 (build 13)

- Initial release

 

[TheBrandon]

I didn't see anything unusual in the router performance tests. High packet loss would cause high throughput variation and/or slow throughput. The glitches shown in the IxChariot plot are more due to the small size of the test file relative to the very high routing speed.

I have tested every possible instance of my ISP being the issue and they are not (removed splitters, replaced connections outside house coming in, noise on lines all good). I tested with multiple packet loss utilities as well. Short burst seem to be a none issue, what I seen impacted was instances where consistent packets are sent after several packets, VPN (using Softphone VoIP) and what not. In every case my 2 E4200 bought 43ish days a part showed the exact same loss\disconnects. Everyone one of my other router and modem combination were perfect\ very minimal. I took this back so it is a none issue but very interesting to me.