With Cisco Connect Cloud, Cisco Linksys attempts to meet the growing demand for managing home networks remotely. This includes keeping tabs on the sites your kids access and when they are online, knowing who is connected to your network at any given moment, and troubleshooting and configuring your home router as well as a family or friend's router that's part of your "cloud" at any time. Cisco Connect Cloud provides these capabilities for Cisco Linksys Smart Wi-Fi routers. While well-intentioned, Cisco Connect Cloud needs more work before it's as good as it potentially can be. Some error messages, as well as problems smoothly going back and forth from the local management software to Cisco Connect Cloud, leaves me hoping there's an update to this router upgrade from Cisco in the near future.

Setup
Using Cisco Connect Cloud requires upgrading Cisco Linksys EA2700, EA3500, and EA4500 routers to the latest firmware. The firmware can be downloaded from home.cisco.com.

Cisco Connect Cloud firmware is different from the Cisco Connect software that ships with the EA series routers. Cisco Connect is an application that is installed on a computer used to initially set up and locally manage the router. The Cisco Connect Cloud service is Web-based and used to manage your router and home network from any Internet connection. Cisco Connect Cloud also has a companion mobile app  of the same name for iOS and Android mobile devices.

When you go to Cisco's website to download the firmware, instructions are available explaining how to upgrade the router. The site also provides links to short videos that show what the Cisco Connect Cloud service can do.

 To test the software, I upgraded to the Cisco Connect Cloud firmware on a Cisco Linksys EA3500 router. The firmware version for the EA2700 is dated 7/6/2012 and is Version 1.1.38.138880.  Once downloaded, I selected "Manual Upgrade" from the Administration tab in the local Cisco Connect software and browsed to the firmware.
After the firmware is upgraded, the Cisco Connect Cloud page opens and you create an account. When account set up is complete, you log into the Cisco Connect Cloud and then associate the router with the account. To do so requires entering the router's password, so make sure to have that on hand before you start.

The setup process is straightforward, which is a recent improvement. Users had complained about the process when Cisco Connect Cloud was first rolled out, but now Cisco has detailed instructions only not on upgrading to the new firmware, but also on how to roll back to the previous firmware.

Using Cisco Connect Cloud
The Cisco Connect Cloud opens to a dashboard view. There's a right-hand menu of apps which include Device list, Guest Access, Parental Controls, Media Prioritization, Speed Test, and Router. These apps can be added to the dashboard as widgets. There's a widget created by default which takes you to external links to learn more about the Cisco Connect Cloud and sign up for 24/7 support. 

Cisco Connect Cloud provides a very graphical way to manage a router—for instance, when clicking open Device List either from the menu or widget, and then "add a device," where you can click icons to add a computer or add a device by WPS. If you select "Other" you can add devices such as TVs, phones, and game consoles.

I tested adding my Droid phone to the network. Clicking "Other" just tells you to refer to the device's user manual how to connect to a wireless network—and then gives you the settings to authenticate to the network. Cisco Connect Cloud doesn’t provide true, secure automation in connecting other devices. It's worth noting, however, that besides the fairly easy push-button connectivity WPS gives, you do have to manually enter network credentials to connect any wireless device to any router, no matter what the brand.

The Media Prioritization app is a Quality-of-Service (QoS) feature that aids in providing better performance for multimedia streaming, VoIP, online gaming, and other bandwidth-demanding tasks. If you want to give a device connected to your network bandwidth priority, you can drag and drop the device into the "High Priority" box within the interface.  You can also select specific apps and online games to give priority to, including Pandora, PlayStation, and Vonage. 

Cloudy Outlook?
I can anticipate some users getting a little confused between using the local Cisco Connect software and the Cisco Connect Cloud for management. You can do just about all of the same management tasks in either interface. The Cisco Connect Cloud is actually just the local administrative interface of the router. It opens up when you go into the local Cisco Connect software and click "Advanced Settings." Instead of the previous Cisco Linksys blue and white management page with which long-time Linksys users are familiar, you get the Cisco Connect Cloud page.

I did encounter some issues making configuration changes back in forth between the local Cisco Connect UI and Cisco Connect Cloud. At one point, when I made a change using Cisco Connect, I tried to go back into the Cisco Connect Cloud interface. The page kept displaying as a broken link and I could not get back into it until I disconnected and reconnected to the router.

Also, when I added a URL to test blocking with parental controls in Cisco Connect Cloud, I went into the local Cisco Connect to remove the URL and kept receiving the error, "Cisco Connect encountered an unexpected problem." I eventually just had to remove the URL from the Cisco Connect Cloud interface. Making configuration changes back and forth between the two interfaces is inconsistent and somewhat problematic.

There are also some management limitations with Cisco Connect Cloud. For instance, the Guest Access widget automatically generates a password you can give guests to access your network. The help text within the widget states that guests aren't given access to personal data or other resources, but I would prefer if the app allowed me to specify which sharable resources on the network I can give access to, if I so choose.

Cisco Connect Cloud will allow access into advanced settings, such as adding static routers, configuring the firewall, IPv6  DMZ , or setting up port forwarding. You can also tweak your wireless settings but it's limited to just doing tasks such as changing the level of encryption or channel width. I did not see any more granular router settings to edit such as setting the beacon interval or the RTS threshold.

Cisco Connect Cloud Mobile App
The reason to associate a local EA series router with a cloud account is so you can manage the router and your home network remotely and from mobile devices. The Cisco Connect Cloud app is available from the App store and Google Play.

You have to enter your Cisco Connect Cloud credentials in the app. The mobile app only allows for basic management. To perform more advanced tasks such as MAC filtering , setting up VPN passthough and more, you  still have to open a browser and go to www.ciscoconnectcloud.com. I would rather just access the site that way and log in than go through the app and have limitations as to which management tasks I can perform.

Apparently you can't be logged into Cisco Connect Cloud from a PC for instance and then logged into the app at the same time. I was logged into the app and then opened up a browser on my laptop to compare features between the two. As soon as I logged into my browser session, the app gave me a "Network Timeout" error. This isn't negative behavior though, because you really only want one session to be active at a time to avoid conflicts with changes to the router. However, the app and service could more elegantly handle multiple logins by detecting that account was already logged in and showing that fact as a message rather than a cryptic timeout message.

Cisco's Cloudy Service
Cisco's Connect Cloud certainly is in step with the home networking industry's goals: cloud-based remote control over home networks and more user-friendly management. Eventually, Cisco Linksys will also offer more than the scant number of third-party apps that now exist for the service. The company plans to offer other apps what will integrate with home appliance such as dishwashers and other electrical devices that will be able to connect to a home network. These apps will give users remote control over many devices in their homes, not just computers.

While Cisco Connect Cloud is a move in the right direction, the errors I experienced indicate a service that still needs fine-tuning. Also, the usefulness of the app is questionable since you can't perform the same management tasks that you can just by going to a browser and logging into the Cisco Connect Cloud service—that ought to be the bare minimum. Cisco Linksys will no doubt continue to hone Cisco Connect Cloud, but, as the service stands right now, it only earns 2.5 out of 5 stars for networking software.

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