A great little router for those demanding reliability and flexibility...
Pros:
Fast, solid, reliable router. Flexible and industy standard. Many features!!!
Cons:
Very hard to configure if your not a network expert. Expensive.
The Bottom Line:
A solid router with lots of features and a very flexible IOS operating system. A must of businesses looking for connectivity routing.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Well, I'm not going to waffle on here but I've been using the 1800 series for well over 2 years now. I love them, and clients love them...
You know why? Because they pretty much never go wrong. The 1801 I did find was great until you get to the ADSL2+ area, but that was easily solved with a PPPoE modem like the Draytek 110 Vigor.
The 1800 series are part of the Intergrated Services range which basically means it does a whole lot more than your standard Cisco routers. The fixed configuration on the lesser models means you cannot extend the hardware, but thats not an issue for the smaller business. My review would apply to also the 2800 series which are the higher power brothers to these.
The Cisco 1800 series ISR router is based upon the IOS, I'm currently using 12.4.
The current configuration is 16 static IP addresses, front facing gateway router, with 4 VLANs each with their own firewall config (yes seperate firewall config) along with port forwarding, VPN and routing.
Let me start with configuration, I binned the SDM which is Ciscos new make it easy approach. If you don't care and want quick access to the net, this is great. For those of us who do want to configure the device we have a wide range of options in 12.4
Firstly, CBAC is binned in favour of ZBF although CBAC is still there it's not advisable to use it because of the excessive CPU overhead.
ZBF is hard to get your head around, eg: making policy and class maps then a zone with a zone-pair to apply to an interface. However, it's efficient, solid and VERY flexible. Allowing different Vlans and ports to have different firewall configs, etc...
As this was installed for providing access to our PC repair department as well, we wanted the network on which possible customers infected PC's reside - isolated from the network, and only to have port 80 to a bunch of URLs for antivirus / MS patch servers, etc...
While the other departments have a few more ports, and the server VLAN had the ports required for the servers to provide web, e-mail, etc.
It's so damn flexible.... really.. it's nice. SNMP monitoring allows us to see what traffic is on what VLAN, and whats going through, what's getting blocked.,
Furthermore this router acts as our VoIP gateway, and provides QOS to VoIP protocols.
You get the idea right? It has so much to offer!
Since this device was configured it has never needed a reboot, the firewall / connectivity is all solid and everything has worked great.
VPN is also pretty quick and reliable. I must say I haven't used everything it is capable of, such as NAC.
I really cannot complain, however our configuration is somewhat advanced and you may have trouble configuring some of these features but if you have a SmartNet they are pretty helpful.
If your looking for a solid router and are up for the challenge, go ahead and get one!!!
