Linksys EA3500 App-Enabled N750 Dual-Band Wireless-N Router with Gigabit and USB

Linksys EA3500 App-Enabled N750 Dual-Band Wireless-N Router with Gigabit and USB..

Buy Linksys EA3500 App-Enabled N750 Dual-Band Wireless-N Router with Gigabit and USB By Linksys

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874 of 911 people found the following review helpful.
Decent, but nothing special.
By Michael A. Behr
I recently did my own a router head-to-head comparison, acquiring a number of different routers and trying them out: this EA3500, some cheap netgears, Amped Wireless High Power Wireless-N 600mW Gigabit Router (R10000G) (skip it), Cisco-Linksys E4200 Dual-Band Wireless-N Router (an older cousin of this router), ASUS RT-N66U Dual-Band Wireless-N900 Gigabit Router (my favorite so far).

I'm also an I/T professional, so I had a lot of fun puting this thing through its paces.

[Update November 9, 2012 - I modified this review slightly to eliminate confusion between my comments about the EA3500 and the older E4200. They're very similar devices. The big difference is that the EA3500 has a big faster top speed than the E4200, and there are ipad/android apps available for wizard configuration.)

Range:
Range is the most important part of a router to me, especially because signal strength is the biggest factor in speed. Even though the maximum speed advertised for a Wireless-N device is far higher, you can be sitting next to an B-wireless router and beat the pants off of an N-wireless device 100 feet away.
Linksys routers seem to abhor the idea of external antennae, which I always feel hurts them. Compared to the Asus RT-N66U, this system tended to be underpowered. My office registered the Asus at -45dBm, while this was at -55dBm. That might not sound like much, but remember that decibels are a logaritmic scale, meaning that the Cisco EA3500 signal is about 1/10 the strength of the Asus.

Speed:
The 750Mb/s is a bit of bad marketing that eveyone participates in. The highest consumer bandwidth options I've seen is 50Mb/s (up & down) from FIOS, which just about any modern router can handle, so if you expect to get better performance from Netflix or Skype, this router problable won't help.
Furthermore, the 750 is 450 on the 5Ghz N channel, and 300 on the 2.4 Ghz N channel, but you can only do one at a time, so the best you'll actually see is 450 (which is darned good). 5GHz N can be faster, but is very susceptible to distance, so from my experience, you pretty much have to be in the same room to get those speeds. That said, if you have your TV come into a slingbox Sling Media Slingbox PRO-HD SB300-100, and then sit in that room with your iPad, you will be able to stream that video with great reception. But of course, one has to wonder why you don't just turn on your TV. When in other rooms, you'll get up to 300Mb/s over 2.4N, or 54Mb/s over 2.4G. Still good enough for streaming, but it takes the shine off of this device versus other less costly ones. This, however, is a general industry issue, and not specifically related to this Linksys. This specific model did indeed demonstrate the ability to connect to it at the advertised speeds... when my laptop was a foot away.

Features:
App - If all you have is an IPad or Android tablet, but no laptop, then having an app that allows you to configure the router is useful. Personally, I have no issues going in through Safari and using the web interface, but if you're not a geek, you might.
Disk - the great thing about the Linksys E series is the ability to easily mount an external hard drive. This is a great feature, and allows you to save hundreds versus a cloud storage system like Dropbox or iCloud (the interface isn't as nice, nor does it have disaster recovery).

Room for improvement:
The ASUS has a few features that I really like but are lacking on the Linksys
No repeater mode - The Asus will allow you to set it up as a repeater for a wireless system. Linksys insists you buy a different device
No DoS protection - I discovered that I am the frequent victim of Denial of Service attacks, though I have no idea why. I suspect everyone is. Amped Wireless and Asus both have configs that let you fight DoS attacks, Linksys does not.
No VPN - The ASUS is also my OpenVPN server, which allows me to be out of the house and securely get access to things on my home network without having to set up a bunch of port forwarding, which is a security risk. Both iPhone/iPad and Android phones & tablets offer native OpenVPN clients.

On my e4200, I had frequent issues with the 5Ghz radio to the point where I had to turn it off. I don't know if that's any better on this EA3500. It seemed to be okay, but only continued use would show it... but my main router is (currently) the ASUS. This one went onto one of my shelves, so I wouldn't really know.

All in all, it's a decent router, but nothing special. I'd likely either get a cheaper router like Netgear WNR2000 N300 Wireless Router, or spring for the Asus. I have my cable modem coming into the Asus, use Netgear XAVB5004 Powerline Network Adapter to get signal into all my rooms, and then have a bunch of devices similar to the WNR2000 for the wireless endpoints.

***UPDATE 12 OCTOBER 2012***
I've actually thrown out my powerline in favor of Actiontec Ethernet to Coax Adapter Kit for Homes with Cable TV Service (ECB2500CK01). the Powerline stuff would occasionally conk out for no apparent reason, which eventually became too frustrating to deal with. The Actiontec takes advantage of the fact that my whole house is wired for Optimum Cable. I get great speeds, and haven't had any drops since it was installed.

[...]

96 of 102 people found the following review helpful.
Great router update
By Pedro J Cardona
Just installed this new router yesterday and could not be happier. We live in a relatively large home with multiple wireless and wired electronics and was having difficulty with having all electronics running at the same time and signal not getting to all areas of the home, even though previous router was also N band. Now signal is much stronger and can have multiple wireless computers and a Roku going on at the same time with no delay. Set up was very easy, it recognizes and I can label the different electronic equipment and very simple set up for guest account. Highly recommended.

107 of 125 people found the following review helpful.
Secret firmware update compromises privacy in a big way.
By M. Erb
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1CZIPBYACRE4H UPDATE: 3/28/2013 Cisco has apparently changed their policy on this in late 2012 due to public outrage. I am leaving my original review intact as a record of what transpired. There are many companies making routers... only you can decide with whom you can trust moving forward. And quite honestly, the performance of this router is not that great or reliable. I've been using a Netgear R6300 for the last month and it is phenomenal.

UPDATE: 7/11/2012 - Cisco surreptitiously updated the firmware of the router on 6/26/2012... my router, your router if you own this and basically every 3500 and 4500 router. The terms of this update, which no sane human being would ever agree too, completely changed my opinion of this router and of Cisco.

AVOID this router and the EA4500 at all cost.

The firmware upgrade, that was done without my knowledge or permission, essentially turns this router into a privacy nightmare.

It is evil.

Just Google Cisco Cloud Connect Privacy and read all about it. You will be shocked and angered.

For historical reasons, I will leave my original review intact, below. But please know that I do not recommend anyone purchase either this EA3500 or EA4500 router unless you have no concerns about Cisco's privacy policy.

There has been such outrage over this that Cisco has released information on how to downgrade the firmware to the previous version. Although this mitigates the problem for the time being, I would not trust this as a lasting fix and would completely avoid Cisco routers. They have lost my trust.

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The Linksys EA3500 has a decent feature set, is easy to setup and provides excellent performance.

Although you can setup the router without using the provided setup CD, I'd recommend using the setup CD. The Setup CD makes the installation and initial setup of your router painless. The entire setup process takes only about 5 minutes. Having said that, I would then manually go in to the web based interface and make a few changes. Notably, you will want to change the admin password to the router so it will not be the same as the wireless passphrase. Having the same password for both is a clear security weakness.

Speaking of security vulnerabilities, you may want to Google "Wi-Fi protected setup security vulnerability" and read up on that. For further information, be sure to listen to episode #337 of the podcast Security Now with Steve Gibson.

Getting back to the setup, it is nearly hands-off. All you need to do is launch Cisco Connect, attach the power cord to the router and plug in the ethernet cable when instructed to do so and then about midway through the process you can either accept the SSID name and password or type in your preferred name and password. It's that easy.

There are quite a few features that will appeal to many users. The Guest Access is great (although not that secure.) You can setup your router to have a separate login for guest access to the Internet. You can specify how many simultaneous guest connections you'll allow. The Guest access password is different (or should be different) than the admin password for access. Another issue I have though is that you cannot change the SSID for Guest Access. It will always be named the same as your main SSID with the addition of "-guest." So if your main SSID were "OurHouse," the Guest access SSID would be "OurHouse-guest" and that cannot be changed to anything else.

The router has gigabit ethernet ports for equipment that is capable of utilizing gigabit throughput.

A USB port on the router allows the user to attach a hard drive for shared across the network access. You can assign users and privileges easily. At the time I made my video review, I had not yet attempted to hook up an external drive but since then, I have. It is really awesome to be able to have network attached storage that all or specified users can access. You can use it for network wide backups of your other connected computers or simply for file storage to keep things off your primary hard drive. It's a great feature that I've never had before and I love it. However, it is not without it's issues either. At this time, you are unable to use automated backup solutions, like Time Machine. A real bummer.

There is an iPhone and Android app you can get to allow you to manage the router with a limited number of options. The app is called Connect Express and it gives you the ability to do certain things such as edit guest access, change the Router network name and password, view what devices are connected to your network, and a few other "advanced" settings. You can even check for firmware updates for the router. It's quite handy to be able to do this from your iPhone but not as full-featured as it should be to be completely useful.

The router itself is quite small and runs quite cool. Actually the bottom of the router gets warmer than the top of the router. I like that there are no protruding antennas, yet coverage and signal strength in my house was excellent. I've got a 2000 sq ft house and the router is on the second floor in my office. The signal reaches all areas of my house with very good to excellent signal strength.

There are no obnoxious blinking lights on this router. Only on the back of the router will you see LED activity which you can use for troubleshooting to make sure you have data moving.

Parental Controls may be helpful for some but it is quite limited in what hours you can block. You can block access by device name with each device having a different schedule. You can block out chunks of time on "School nights" and/or "Weekends" between the hours specified. But what is weird is that you can only start blocking between Noon and Midnight and you can only stop the blocking between the hours of 12:30AM to 11:30AM. If you wanted to block access starting at 9AM until 3PM, you could not specify that time.

It's also possible to block specific URL's but you are limited to only 8 blocked URL's. When you attempt to go to a blocked URL, the browser displays a warning page that the site is blocked and allows access only if the parental control password is entered. You can also completely block access to a specific device by choosing the "always" option. It's basic protection but better than none I guess. It's just not that robust.

My final thoughts: The security issues are troubling. Maybe in a home situation you can let some of these slide, but you certainly would want to consult with a security expert before considering the use of this router in a business setting.

The iPhone app, although better than nothing I suppose, leaves much to be desired in what you can really accomplish with it.

The web interface that Linksys uses has a very tired look to it. It's looked this way ever since I started using Linksys routers and while there is something to be said for familiarity, it really could use a serious updating. In my opinion, Netgear has a much nicer user interface and their newer routers also have a slick application for managing the router that offers more control of router functions and settings.

Overall, It's a decent router, if not a little pricey, in an attractive, compact and unpretentious package.

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