A little over a year ago I decided it was time to replace my aging Linksys WRT54G wireless router in my home office with something new and fancy. I happened to be visiting a local computer shop one Saturday afternoon and came across the Cisco WRVS4400N Wireless-N Gigabit Security Router – VPN v2.0, which on the box sounded amazing. It was a little on the expensive side comparatively, but hey… it was Cisco, and I could setup VPN profiles on the device and easily connect remotely to my local network… so the extra money would be worth it.

Boy was I wrong. This device has never functioned even close to my expectations, despite running firmware version 2.0.2.1. My biggest complaint is that I am finding the wireless connectivity terribly unreliable with frequent disconnects. My second largest issue is that the supported QuickVPN client is a sad sad Windows hunker, and the only way I can get the VPN connection working reliably on my Mac laptop is use to VPNTracker, which is beautiful but significantly more money that I am willing to pay for something that should work using Mac OS X’s built in L2TP over IPSEC or Cisco IPSEC connection. AFAIK the only other option for Mac users is to use IPSecuritas, but unfortunately it wasn’t working with Mac OS 10.7 at the time.

In summary (as I sit here connected to my Airport Express) I am far from impressed with the WRVS4400N, and this reaffirms that I should only purchase equipment after reading reviews not the other way around (as you may be now).

Good luck, and move on to something else. If you find something else awesome and worth it, please feel free to post it.