A quick rundown of how the Cisco E4200 has been treating me

It’s been over a week without unplugging it, so here’s a quick rundown of how the Cisco E4200 is doing.

Signal isn’t all that strong, but the quality is fine — one bar still holds a usable connection. Don’t ask me for the theory behind it, I’m not the expert. As for punching through walls, don’t get your hopes up.

It’s been powered on for a week now, with the download box running the whole time — aMule and Transmission inside, downloading and seeding both, uploads outweighing downloads overall. No freezes.

I grabbed the first revision, honestly for DD-WRT. In practice… stock is fine, plenty good enough. DD-WRT costs you some signal strength after flashing; Tomato keeps the signal decent but apparently doesn’t do 5G.

Right now it’s paired with an RE1000 repeater, and one thing to watch: the Cisco RE1000 is a dumb-simple setup — once it connects, the AP name is identical, and it’ll drop the main AP and hop to the secondary one based on signal. But even though the RE1000 calls itself plug-and-play, you’d better pin the wifi channel and frequency on the main AP, or the RE1000 gets very unstable.

All in all, the thing’s alright… though it’s winter right now, so we’ll see whether heat becomes a problem come summer.