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(More customer reviews)After reading reviews on the Cradlepoint 1200 and reading through the manual on the Cradlepoint web site, I was positively enthused by the capabilities of this device to provide load balancing and fail over between the two wired and two wireless (3G/4G) connections at my location. The feature set is rich, the capabilities extensive, and the support for latest generation wireless modems top notch.
Once I received the router and started playing around with it, I discovered that the reality was quite disappointing compared to my expectations. Some key challenges that others may find useful:
- I can't get either a Verizon (LG VL600) or AT&T (LG AD600) wireless modem to work reliably despite having the latest firmware and both modems being listed on the supported modems list. I can get connected, but the connection usually drops almost immediately and occasionally stays up but doesn't pass traffic. I've attempted to contact Cradlepoint technical support, but their online chat, after an hour, hasn't resulted in anyone actually coming online.
- Just about every configuration change you make to the router results in a reboot. This means, for even minor changes, you're creating a one minute outage for your entire network with each change or set of changes. Not fatal, but annoying... particularly as competing routers don't require reboots like this.
- I had planned to load balance between my two wired connections and use my wireless modems as fail over. Unfortunately, you can either choose to have load balancing across *all* devices or fail over across *all* devices, but not a mix of the two. I therefore either have to use one interface as primary or run the risk of having hefty modem usage bills when my normal wired connections are running just fine all month. Only annoying if you have two wired connections, I suppose.
- Load balancing doesn't seem to work properly with their SPI firewall. I'm still researching, but it appears the SPI doesn't track sessions across multiple interfaces or the sessions aren't being distributed across the multiple interfaces properly. The net result is my log file filling up every 20 minutes (you can tune down the logging level if you want) with warning messages about blocked packets that didn't match a session... along with web pages and mail messages that don't always load properly on the first attempt.
- Although it isn't written in any of the documentation and doesn't show up in the settings, you cannot use the last IP address of a network block on the LAN side of the router as the router uses both that IP address and the next one to function properly. I discovered this while browsing through the Cradlepoint knowledge base searching for an answer on the other topic. So, if you're on a Class C, don't use x.x.x.254 as your LAN IP address and gateway. (Some network engineers prefer routers at the top of the subnet instead of the bottom. I know we are few and far between, though.)
- I had a slew of errors with clients connected to the built-in WiFi. Despite strong signal strength and reliable wireless connections, the clients would periodically be unable to send anything through the Cradlepoint 1200 essentially blocking their access. The problem corrects itself after a few minutes. Rather than spend more time debugging this, I switched to using one of my other WiFi routers as a bridge and haven't had any issues after that, but something is certainly wrong with the WiFi at least in my configuration.It's certainly not the worst device out there and there are some nice features and some areas that work pretty well, but it seems like the issues -- at least in my configuration -- outweigh those advantages by a long shot. I'm rather disappointed with my purchase, but am determined to find a way to make it work. I just wish I had bought a different device.
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