Cisco RV220W Small Business Router – Does It Fit to Your Business?
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If your small business is getting bigger and your home-class wireless router is not adequate to support your growing business needs, you should upgrade your router to a small business class router. A business class router firstly must be capable of delivering high speed network both wired and wireless connection (if available). With high speed network, you can assure that your business applications can run smoothly.
Secondly, your router must support the secure tunneling for remote site connection. This is important should your network expand to multiple sites and inter-network connection is required. Or you allow your travelling users to access your private network securely via the public Internet. Thirdly, your router must be capable of protecting your business information assets against any internet threats. You know that the emerging internet threats are getting smarter in penetrating your business network to gain access into your critical business data.
Should you ready to upgrade your home class wireless router to small business class wireless router, consider this Cisco RV220W a small business router for your small business internet security firewall.
What this Product Does
Cisco RV220W is a compact internet security router which is designed for small business network security infrastructure – robust but affordable and easy to manage.
High Speed
To support your high bandwidth applications, the Cisco RV220W internet security router includes 4-port gigabit Ethernet Switch to help you connect up to 4 gigabit enabled desktop computers or server using wired CAT5e network cable. Or you can expand the network by adding a gigabit switch for your LAN network.
For providing the wireless access for mobile devices, the RV220W includes the built-in wireless access point which is powered by the latest wireless 802.11n technology with dual band support. Unfortunately this is not simultaneous dual band router, but selectable dual band router. With selectable dual band, the router can only work either in 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequency bands. If your wireless clients contain mixed wireless devices with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz based devices, you can only select 2.4GHz band to allow all mixed wireless clients to connect to the network. If you select the 5GHz band for less interference and clean network, you can only allow wireless devices with 5GHz based-band. But if you would like to upgrade all the wireless devices to support 5GHz band, you upgrade your network to work in its best performance.
Hybrid VPN
Unlike home wireless routers which support the VPN pass-through, the Cisco RV220W includes the hybrid VPN with IPSec (IP Security) and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). With this VPN support, you can create up to 25 IPSec secure inter-sites link between your business locations and up to 5 SSL remote connections for remote users.
Advanced Security
Cisco RV220W includes 4-gigabit ports which supports Virtual LAN (VLAN) to allow you segregate your network based on your security needs. And you don’t need a layer-3 Switch for inter-VLAN communication capability because the router supports inter-VLAN routing.
The other VLAN related feature, the router supports multiple SSIDs to allow you create up to 4 different wireless networks with different SSIDs. And the good thing is that the router supports SSID to VLAN mapping with wireless client isolation. But, for your small business network, do you need VLANs? Network segmentation is secure but with the lack of knowledge and poor documentation, implementing the VLANs in your small business is just increasing your overhead administration. If the requirement of network segregation does not exist, you don’t need implementing the VLANs in your small business.
The Cisco RV220W supports the must have router features such as NAT and SPI to help you protect your network against any internet threats. How can you manage your workforce to use the safe / clean internet content? The router supports the Cisco ProtectLink Web cloud-based security service. But remember, the service is not free. You need to subscribe the services and pay in a yearly basis. Security is expensive but it is worth for securing your network environment.
What about sharing the printer and the storage? You cannot expect those two essential features in networking available in this router. The RV220W doesn’t include the USB port to allow you share the storage or printer. You need to purchase separate wired or wireless print-server for sharing the printer. But remember, mostly all the wireless print servers operate in 2.4GHz band. It means that your router must operate in 2.4GHz band as well. This is the minus of selectable dual-band router, you cannot operate the 5GHz band for high speed and clean network while you have to connect other 2.4GHz based devices on the network.
Cisco RV220W is ideal solution for small business network if all your wireless clients support 5GHz band. And to support shared printer, you need wired type print server unless it supports 5GHz band.
By Ki Grinsing
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Source by Ki Grinsing
