Cisco-Linksys WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster
by Linksys
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Our Price: $159.00 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $12.50 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Cisco-Linksys WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster
Customer Review: Poor Customer Service, Great aftermarket products
Summary: 5 Stars
having played with several "super g" routers from various manufactures recently, this is probably the best of the bunch (see my review on netgear wgt624 and it's flakiness).
i would agree the customer service is abysmal and offshoring has made things go from bad to worse.
however the best part (at least for me) and for which i recommend this router is the number of aftermarket firmwares available. Linksys' firmware was based on GPL code and so they had to release the source code. take a look at Openwrt, or Wifi-box or (my personal favorite) Sveasoft. they are all excellent. replace the stock Linksys firmware with these and you've got yourself an extremely powerful box.
however installing a third party firmware won't get you any Linksys support but i figure it is better to participate and ask questions in various internet forums than deal with clueless customer support reps. also playing with firmware is not for the fainthearted and it does require some amount of technical skills.
anyways that's my 2 cents. i guess this router may not be for everyone (especially the group who want to open the box and have "everything just work"). but for the more technologically inclined, this is a great little toy to play with and to have several cool features (like BGP, OSPF, bandwiddth shaper etc.) which one can only get in enterprise routers and never in a sub-$100 router
Customer Review: flawless installation
Summary: 5 Stars
I have bought many things through Amazon, yet this is the first review I have ever written. I am computer illiterate and didn't even know what a router was until a few days ago when I purchased a laptop to go along with my desktop, and I wanted to use the wireless feature. I had read so many horrible installation reviews on this site, that I was prepared for a horrible experience, but my nature is to always plow through and I decided to get the router. They have a installation cd that comes with the router and I began following the instructions, but when I got to a few items that they wanted input--such as my network name and my WEP, I had no idea what they were talking about. So I stopped and called tech support and spoke to a guy in about 20 seconds who referred me to their installation website that explained in much more detail (but still simplistically) for me to finish my step by step installation. It literally took about 5 minutes to complete the installation, and the instructions were redundantly clear. The router works great--powers my laptop out to my patio (about 50') when the signal begins to lose strength. I don't know how much further it will go. So, again, I would rate the installation of this product as about as easy as it could be. I don't know why so many people have been complaining, but for me, who knows next to nothing computerish, I found this easier than any recipe to follow.Customer Review: So far so good and better than Netgear
Summary: 4 Stars
Yesterday I bought the Netgear WGT624. What a disaster. I says it takes about 20 minutes to set up and 3 hours later I was about the kill myself. To sum up my experience with that, my desktop would not connect to the Internet (despite being wired to the modem and router) and my laptop would. Also, my desktop Norton software had to be completely disabled. Went back to BestBuy today to buy the Linksys WRT54GS (after some online research and talking to their Geek Squad and fellow customers). They definitely recommended this one over Netgear. So far it is working fine, but took over an hour to set up. I also had to disable my Norton AntiVirus software in order to complete the setup on my desktop. After a call to their customer support (about 20 minutes wait time) I spoke to a woman with reasonably good English. She helped me set up my laptop by wiring it to the router and connecting to the Linksys setup site. Now my laptop is running perfectly and so is my desktop. I have also re-enabled Norton and everything still seems to be working. Though this router is bigger and clunkier than the Netgear one, so far my experience has been better. The customer support was also a lot better than Netgear. Netgear obviously outsources their support to India and the rep I spoke with was reading directly from a script. I was also able to reach a Linksys rep via chat, when I could not do so for Netgear.Customer Review: U dont need a GS,a WRT54G will do
Summary: 5 Stars
hi, after reading all the reviews and finally buying the product here is my opinion, in case u are not going to use a linksys pcima card on your latop or a linksys pci card on a desktop with Speed booster enabled dont buy the WRT54GS as its of no use ,you might as well save the money and buy the WRT54G i had read another review give here about the same thing, i should have followed his advice,its basically pointless to buy the WRT54GS unless u r using a linksys speed booster proprietry card on the other end.
as for the product itself its great, excellent it meet my expectaions setup/configuring it was super easy,although range was a problem if u have no obstacles it works as advertised 100m i.e if u have a line of sight. if u have walls in between your signals is going to drop 20 percent with each wall suggest you take that into consideration, even the placement of the router in your house is important. it did not cover my entire house. so i ended up buying the linksys range expander, which was a nightmare to configure until i read a review given on this site for linksys range expander,once it was working the thing worked like a charm.
over all the product is excellent,no wall mount though although i feel i should have bought the linksys SRX enabled router as it s advertised to have a better range it could have a solved so many problems i faced.
Customer Review: Run away!
Summary: 1 Stars
This product provided the single worst computer experience I have had in 30 years of computer use. Our needs seemed fairly simple. We wanted to upgrade an existing 802.11b network to 802.11g because some of our computers no longer worked with the 802.11b standard. We have a house, and a home office attached to the garage. We had two Netgear routers, one in each location. Their setup was maybe an hour. The Linksys routers would not talk to each other or assign IP addresses properly. My wife is a computer specialist. We both spend hours and hours over the Thanksgiving weekend trying to make it work. Tech support was horrid. I waited for something like 45 minutes to obtain a chat session that did not help. I searched through 400 unhelpful articles in their self-help web tool. Many of them had contradictory instructions. I tried phone support--one time a tech decided one of the routers was bad. Another time I waited on hold for about a half hour while they tried to re-direct me to the tools that had already failed. And while they told me how much my business means to them. We estimate we spent some 10-12 hours trying to do what should have taken an hour. Buy something else!!!
If all you need is one router in one location, maybe this product is OK. If you have any more complex needs this product and the company stink.