Review: Linksys E4200 router

Linksys' E4200 dual-band router.

As the number of digital doodads scattered around my house continues to proliferate, my poor old wireless router has become overloaded and increasingly erratic, not to mention badly behaved. Daily resets and network grief have unfortunately become an ongoing part of my existence.

So you can imagine how keen I was when the PR person for Cisco's sub-brand, Linksys, contacted me and offered an E4200 wireless router for review. Linksys's marketing bumpf talks up the E4200 as a "Maximum Performance" router. My jaded inner gadget reviewer may have initially groaned at yet more hype-laden PR hyperbole, but at the end of the day the E4200 proved it wrong.

Features

Perhaps the killer feature of the E4200 was its support for both 5 and 2Ghz wireless. In essence this means that the E4200 can play nice in environments where there's a mix of wireless gadgets. With older, single band routers, fast 802.11n gizmos have to coexist with slower wireless gear which more often than not involves falling back to slower wireless speeds. This is of course a complete downer given the extra dollar premium that anything with 802.11n attracts.

Dual band goodness aside, the E4200 is also well stocked with lashings of other nifty features such as USB network storage, the ability to set up guest accounts and the Cisco Connect app which greatly simplified the initial set-up process.

The Linksys E4200 definitely wins points for looks. Where most routers tend to come from the "been hit too many times with the ugly stick" school of design, the E4200 looks more like a designerish bit of Bang & Olufsen gear. While my existing router is a garish beast that I kept hidden out of sight, the E4200's smooth, curvaceous form was easily stylish enough to be left on show.

Spinning the E4200 around exposed four Ethernet LAN ports and one WAN port (for connecting a broadband modem).

All Ethernet ports can do Gigabit speeds, so they'll zip data around at a zippy 1000Mbps (ideal for streaming HD content). There's also a button for the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) feature, as well as a recessed reset button. There's also a USB port for hooking up an external hard drive that the E4200 will then make available for sharing to all networked computers. The inclusion of WPS is a real gem as it easily allows WPS-enabled gadgets to be quickly connected to the E4200 at the push of a single button and network storage proved useful beyond measure.

Where most routers pack an array of garish indicator lights on their fronts, Linksys has sensibly chosen to limit things to a single white light (located under the Cisco logo), that only blinks when there is a network issue or the E4200 is powering up.

Setting up

The sheer joy of setting up a router is usually an experience akin to root canal surgery. Thankfully, getting the E4200 configured was fairly painless experience thanks largely to Cisco Connect. After hooking up Ethernet cables and powering up the E4200, I was fully configured and running in less than five minutes. Not too stressful and definitely not too shabby.

The addition of Guest accounts is pretty nifty as it allows the E4200 to share internet connectivity with visitors without giving access to anything on your LAN (e.g. storage, printers etc.). Unfortunately, the E4200 only supports ten simultaneous guest accounts, which is fine for home use, but probably isn't going to be enough for business use.

Equally nice is the ability to share the content of a USB external hard drive, complete with user account restrictions. The E4200 also supports UPnP so content can be streamed to other UPnP-compliant devices (such as my PS3, if the PlayStation Network happens to be running).

Robust, parental control content-filtering is also included, and this allows parents to control the way connected computers can accesses online sites. With copyright infringement soon to become a legally punishable offence, parental access to control features could be a boon for parents worried about wayward teens visiting the Pirate Bay for a spot of torrent pillage.

Performance

Feature-wise, about the only thing missing from the E4200 was racing stripes, which is a real shame, as it proved to be a smoking fast router. In the 5GHz tests, the E4200 managed to crank through a blistering 100.1Mbps when my 802.11n capable laptop was in the same room. Shifting large chunks to and from my network drive happened amazingly fast. Pulling 1.34GB took an astonishing 1 min 22 seconds. Migrating my lappy to the other end of the house (usually a notoriously fickle Wi-Fi blackspot), the E4200 managed an equally impressive 67.1Mbps, (which is about 67Mbps faster than my existing router).

Most importantly for me, The E4200 didn't miss a beat when it came to stress testing. As mentioned earlier, my existing router frequently curled up its toes and frequently demanded resets. Not so with the E4200 however, which didn't bat an eyelid, even with every device in every room of my home making demands on it simultaneously over the course of an entire day (which is something that would've had me rushing for a fire extinguisher with my existing router).

As a network storage drive controller the E4200 proved at best average. Plugging in a spare external USB 2.0 hard drive, it seemed to be more than a little on the slow side, especially when compared to my dedicated Western Digital network drive. Transferring large files seemed to take forever and media streaming frequently stalled and stuttered.

Verdict

The E4200 isn't perfect, but it is getting close. Linsys has got a lot of things right, managing to pack oodles of genuinely useful features, and near bomb-proof levels of reliability, into the E4200's tiny case.

Over the week or so that I spent reviewing the E4200, it proved to be an extremely rare beast in that it really did live up to its PR hype of "maximum performance". Rounding things out, is its unusually good looks. In short, it's hard not to recommend the E4200 to anyone wanting a decent well specced wireless router.

SPECS
Linksys E4200 dual-band router
$349.95

Supported Wireless: 802.11n, (a, b, g, u, ab)
Ports: 1x USB 2.0, 5x Ethernet (LAN ports 1-4, WAN port 5)
Number of Antennas: 3 internal antennas per each 2.4GHz & 5GHz radio band
UPnP: Supported
Supported Security protocols: WEP, WPA, WPA2
NB: DSL connectivity not included