Initial thoughts on the RV315W

[Brian Bergin]

Out of the box CVR328W observations:

• •1)      Gigabit WAN ports but only 100Base-T LAN ports?  If one has a faster than 100Base-T Internet connection what good does it do to be limited to 100Base-T LAN ports?  As I have stressed in multiple previous EFTs, Cisco needs to stop using 18 year old 100Base-T technology.  With fibre and ultra-high-speed cable modems becoming more common, not to mention that I know of no desktop or laptop that doesn’t ship with a gigabit Ethernet port, 1995 technology is just ancient.  Even my cheap cable modem has gigabit telling me cable companies expect to offer speeds beyond 100Mpbs so why design a new product that’s already outdated?
  
  
• •2)      Not rack mountable!  This eliminates almost every customer we have from using this device.  The device appears to be the same basic chassis as the ISA500 series so why not use the shell from the ISA, it supports rack mounting and it’d reduce production costs to only need one shell for multiple devices?  If it were the size of an RV042 I’d understand no rack mount option, but this is too large to be a desktop unit.  The rubber feet also preclude sliding it into a 1U shelf unless the shelf has nothing above it.
  
  With all due respect, Cisco simply must not manufacture a business-class device that’s not rack mountable save perhaps a WAP that’s designed to be mounted on a wall or ceiling.  Having a device sitting on a shelf or desk is just asking for an accident.  Our customers almost universally either have a full rack with servers & network equipment mounted in it or they use something like a 6U wall mount rack to mount their networking equipment.  Yes, shelves are available but they offer no protection from the errant pull on a cable or bump that knocks it off the shelf.
  
  
• •3)      Since 4G devices are going to be supported I would immediately remove any reference to 3G only.  3G/4G would be far better.  If you limit yourselves to 3G in marketing material no one is going to look at this device if they have 4G in their area. 
  
  
• •4)      For cellular connections, should I be able to get a USB tethered connection?  My Motorola Droid RAZR on 4.1.2 (Verizon) sees the USB connection and allows me to turn tethering on but your device won’t pull an IP.  That would be a very substantial option for redundancy if cable/DSL were to fail that one could just connect their 3G/4G cell phone to the USB port and put it in tether mode.  Really all you’d need was a DHCP client there.
  
  
• •5)      Manual says admin/admin for default credentials.  The device has stamped cisco/admin as the default credentials.
  
  
• •6)      The antenna mounts (or the covers) are far superior to that of the ISA500 series!  The ISA500’s seem to come loose too easily when attaching the antenna.  Please share these covers with the ISA team!
  
  
• •7)      Load balancing appears to be like the SA500’s was designed.  Weighted balancing doesn’t work.  The RV082 has by far the best multi-WAN load balancing of all your products, even over the ISA500 series where it knows both up and downstream speeds.  These speeds can vary greatly and when they do a weighted % doesn’t work.  For example, one with a 100Mbps down/5 out cable connection as WAN1 cannot enter a proper % that to a 6Mbps down/384k out DSL on WAN2.  Having multiple WAN connections is often for redundancy not speed so knowing what speeds are available is important so the router doesn’t try to use the secondary connection unless its primary is overloaded.  It took me months to convince the ISA group they needed this option and they’re still not all the way to the capability RV082 had a decade ago.
  
  
• •8)      Thus far I see no way to set a WAN MAC address.  This is important for us to be able to be able to switch around from router to router as our cable provider caches MAC addresses and it’s a real pain to swap for testing.  Am I just missing something?  BTW, we also use this for customers who maintain a spare router so they’re fully configured to swap out in case of a failure without having to call the cable provider and asking them to flush the cache which half of their reps don’t know how to do.

[Xiao Han]

Hi Sir,

I really appreciate what you have proposed,I will feedback to our team ASAP.

For the 4G support, we have several dongle support list for your reference:

Pantech / UTStarcom	UML290VW	4G
Huawei	USBConnect Force 4G	4G

If you have other dongle,please try to connect and we have not test all the types.

For thw weighted balancing, we will try to re-produce it and let you know the result.

Thanks again!

Xiao