Cisco Small Business RV Series vs. Sierra Wireless AirLink Cellular Routers and Gateways

It's best suited for small offices 10-25 users. Any more and its best to move away to a more higher tier. It will be less appropriate for a mid level company with a large staff. It's best for a small business with a limited budget and less strenuous security functionality.

Incentivized

If you only need 10 devices, there are other solutions that will fit and may be cheaper. For deployments of hundreds of devices, the management capabilities of the product are well worth the cost. In addition, for sites that run on low power (e.g. solar), the devices are fantastic, with idle power <1W for some devices.

Incentivized

• It has the typical firewall functions you'd expect in an all in one unit.
• GUI interface is easier to use by less technical users.
• The extra features such as VLANs are nice to have.

Incentivized

• Cellular band coverage
• Managability
• Software updates

Incentivized

• More switchports would be welcome, although this would increase cost and size
• Faster wireless would improve performance
• An SPF port would allow uplinking to more business-class switches

Incentivized

• Configuration changes require a reboot

Incentivized

The features are good. The support is good. The resources to deploy, manage, and operate it are good. Customer's feedback and testimonials are good. The updates in terms of zero day vulnerabilities are good and timely. But, I still give an 8 out of 10 because I think the pricing, licensing, and GUI can be improved more.

Incentivized

Cisco's power really stems from its brand reputation and honestly not much else. No one ever got fired for deploying Cisco, and that's why it stands out. The Cisco Small Business RV Series is no exception there; the unit is built well and does the job. However, much more powerful alternatives for routers are out there—the biggest competitor being Ubiquiti. The UniFi routers are significantly more powerful in all regards, including routing speed, IPS/IDS speeds, and VPN functionality. Support for those is admittedly rather lackluster though, so if your network is critical, you are effectively self-insuring your equipment. For some that may be fine, but for others, that risk of extended downtime is just not worth it.

Incentivized

The manageability and power requirements of the Sierra Wireless modems is great. The cost of alternative solutions may be lower, but the Sierra Wireless solution has saved the company from many issues over the past 10 years.

Incentivized

• Very good ROI
• Most products have a CLI that is easy to use and understand.
• Very large feature set. Cisco offers numerous open standard and proprietary protocols and options in their code that other vendors lack parity with.

Incentivized

• These devices have allowed us to replace copper circuits without the high costs of a satellite solution
• The low operating costs have allowed us to deploy cell to improve resiliency at many sites
• The serial port allows us to replace modem access at sites where copper circuits have become very expensive.

Incentivized