I recently purchased two of these Cisco WAP4410N WAPs. The goal was to help my brother-in-law cover his large home with good quality wireless. Based on my experience doing previous WAP installations, my guess was that is would take between three and six WAPs to full cover his large house (which has lots of brick and steel) with good quality coverage. I was impressed that by strategically positioning the units I was able to cover the entire house with only two of these WAPs. The coverage consisted of three floors (one was a finished basement).
The setup of these units was simple, the firmware is stable, and configuration was straight=forward. Since they were setup they have worked flawlessly and required no further attention.
The only thing a bit unusual (for those used to Netgear, Linksys, etc.) is that you have to setup a Cisco account (no charge just register online) to be able to download firmware, etc. This ended being unnecessary because the firmware in the unit was up-to-date.
If you're looking for really good WAPs that support Wireless-N and have lots of configuration options (e.g., Mesh, Multiple SSIDs, etc.) I highly recommend this unit. It has a slightly higher price than other (consumer units) you can buy, but it definitely deserves the "business-class" label that Cisco gives it. Cisco WAP4410N Wireless-N Access Point - PoE/Advanced Security
I just installed 2 WAP4410's on a Linksys RVS4000 router and brought them up in a basic configuration just to get the system running. I will be tuning the configuration over the next few weeks and will report the results.
Right out of the box, the units worked as advertised with zero hassle. I updated the firmware, changed the admin password, assigned both static IP addresses and resolved the host name to enable roaming which has worked well thus far. I initially enabled SSID broadcast to make it easier to find for setup, but I will eventually disable. So far (anecdotal) the speed seems good, and the APs have had no issues with a mix of a/b/g/n devices. I have no plans to enable PoE, as there are known issues with the link speed dropping to 100mb/s. So far, so good.
It has now been a month, and I have enabled a second guest SSID and have configured links with a number different devices (WGA600n gaming adapter for an Xbox360, WET610N for printer with no hassle at all). The performance and range have been excellent. No problems with the VLAN or the QoS functions for streaming.
In the final analysis; a little pricey but an excellent product. 5 Stars.
Having been fed up with the problems I've had with building my own and buying various AP's, I decided to spend a little bit more and try this one. It's been fairly dependable. I use the "fairly" qualifier, because I have had a an issue or two, but I can't be sure it wasn't a neighbor setting up a new AP on the same channel, or something like that. Otherwise it's been solid in nearly a year of service. I really appreciate that it supports IPv6 out of the box, even in the management interface. It's got a lot more control than a regular consumer AP with things like vlan support and pretending to be multiple AP's with different SSID's, etc. One other thing is that it's more and more difficult to find a decent AP only wireless AP. At the consumer level, they all seem to be wireless routers now. I already have a firewall and only wanted an AP. This fits the bill nicely. One other feature I'm not using now, but may later is PoE.
After reading some of the stronger complaints and one star ratings, I still bought the WAP4410N, based primarily upon my experience with Cisco products. Once received, I immediately downloaded the latest firmware update: WAP4410N-fw-2.0.2.1-K9.img. Connected the access point to my computer and followed the quick start instructions provided. Flashed the firmware and rebooted the access point. Set the configuration to work with my gigabit network configuration and then reset my HP wireless printers and wireless computers.
This works as designed, no issues and no drops. So I'm not sure what those 'experts' are saying when they complain. Maybe they were on an older version of the firmware, maybe it was something else, but this access point is much stronger than the old Netgear WG302 access point we had.
As far as experience goes, I have 25 years in IT with a good bit of that in network appliances. This is a good small business/home business network appliance. And I do recommend it, above and beyond the negative comments posted here. And we do intend to buy more.
The price is good and the warranty is 3 years.
We bought a couple of these 4410N for office. It had to support VLAN trunking (802.11q), multiple SSIDs, RADIUS authentication on a Windows server and 802.11n. On paper this nice Linksys supports all these features, right?
In fact multiple SSIDs feature simply doesn't work with stock 2.0.1.0 firmware on devices with MACs starting with 68:xx:xx (that's all new hardware, I guess). I had to open a ticket with Cisco and they sent me 2.0.2.1 beta firmware which fixed the issue. But it still doesn't work for iPhones with Radius authentication feature enabled - the device puts iPhone's MAC into "User-Name" field instead of a real domain login name.
Overall, it's not a business-grade solution, I wouldn't recommend it so far - the software is waaay too buggy.
And if you want to buy it for home - consider other options. You don't need VLANs support anyway. Linksys E3000 or Netgear WNDR3700 cost about the same, but provide 5 GHz band and faster transfer speeds.
I installed three of these wireless access points at a customer site - they worked great at first, but after three days, they quit responding until they were rebooted. No errors were indicated and the latest firmware had been loaded. Once the access point was rebooted, they worked great again for another two or three days and then the problem would re-occur. After a number of incidents, and much research, it appears that this is an ongoing problem with these access points. Check this thread at cisco support before you buy:
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I have removed these and replaced them with another brand. Just couldn't afford to drive out every time they failed. - Wireless - Access Point - Wireless N - Cisco'
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