Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall

The Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall offers security-conscious small businesses an easy-to-set-up box that functions as a router, firewall, VPN server, and a wireless access point all in one.? The well-organized Web interface is chock-full of management options, including port forwarding, firewall access rules and creating VPN user accounts. As a router, however, the RV110W is fairly basic as it doesn?t support Gigabit Ethernet or offer dual-band wireless. While those two things would have been nice to have, their omission is not surprising, considering the RV110W?s sub-$100 price tag.

Features
The key selling point for the RV110W is its built-in support for a VPN server. Remote workers can use the RV110W's VPN to connect and access office printers, databases, and applications as if they were physically in the office. Deploying VPN usually means investing in a more expensive router or other specialized hardware, so getting a VPN router for $99 or less is quite a bargain.

As a VPN server, RV110W supports both PPTP and QuickVPN. PPTP is the easier connection protocol as it is supported by Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and even iOS devices. The App Store has PPTP clients for Apple?s iPads and iPhones.

Another impressive feature in the RV110W: it supports IPv6 out of the box. Businesses thinking about updating their networks to use the newer Internet address standard want IPv6-certified products. Considering that most modern operating systems have IPv6 support built-in, a router that supports the standard makes the transition much smoother.

For wireless connectivity, RV110W broadcasts on 2.4 GHz-band. Looking for the higher 5 GHz-band? Look elsewhere. Being single-band is not a huge drawback for the RV110W, since many business routers still don?t offer dual-band wireless, but it would have been nice to have.

The Hardware
The Cisco RV110W has one WAN port for Internet connectivity and four LAN ports in the back. There are two external antennas on the back for wireless networking. Square and compact, it has four rubber feet on the bottom to stand-alone or can be wall-mounted. There?s even a lock on the side to physically secure the router in place.

The square and compact box measures 1.18? x 5.91? x 5.91? (HWD) and weighs a mere 0.61 lbs. The black box is pretty nondescript, except for the glossy front panel with indicator lights for power, wireless activity, Internet connectivity, and for each of the four LAN ports. The front panel also has a button for Wi-Fi Protected Setup that makes it adding Wi-Fi clients to the network a snap.

The router offers at most 100Mbps over its wired network as none of the four ports support Gigabit Ethernet. While Gigabit Ethernet is not yet a must-have on most business routers, the increasing number of applications, file-sharing, and video streaming within the office makes it a should-have.

Setup
Unlike other similarly priced Cisco routers, the RV110W does not come with the Cisco Connect software for setup. Instead, I followed the printed Quick Start Guide to connect the firewall and configure the wireless network. When I logged into the Device Manager to finish the process, the Web interface automatically launched a Setup Wizard to collect configuration information. The entire process took less than 10 minutes.

I was impressed that Cisco put in some effort in the wizard to make the router secure. In one of the tests, I tried to quit the setup wizard since the router is configured as a basic gateway by default. The Device Manager forced me to change the admin account?s default password before quitting.

Cisco also requires the password to be strong. When I tried to disable the ?strong password strength? rule in order to set up a weak password, Device Manager displayed messages warning me about the risks. Many routers are vulnerable because the user forgot to change the default password or had set weak ones.

When configuring the wireless network, the wizard prompted me to turn on wireless encryption on the network, such as WPA Personal with TKIP/AES or the stronger WPA2 Personal with AES. Considering that open wireless networks expose users to man-in-the-middle attacks and packet sniffing, I appreciated the wizard selected encryption by default. In fact, when I tried to set up an open wireless network, the wizard displayed warning messages.

The wizard takes care of assigning IP addresses, setting the time, configuring the gateway, and turning on the wireless network. All the other configuration tasks are available in a menu on the Device Manager?s left pane. Clicking on the menu name, such as Firewall, VPN, Wireless, Networking, and Status displayed all the tasks available. After I turned on VPN, I could see when a user was connected to the network. I found it effortless to navigate and understand.

Cisco released the latest firmware update in the middle of testing. After copying the downloaded file to a USB key, it was a snap to upload the firmware to the router using the Web interface.

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