Cisco-Linksys WRT610N Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router
by Linksys
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List Price: Our Price: $109.98 You Save: $90.01 (45%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $49.99 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Cisco-Linksys WRT610N Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router
Customer Review: Be warned WRT610N should be a prototype!
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm an electrical engineer and understand all the engineering and management side of product development. This router is NOT ready for production. I'm quite sure my setup is correct and the environment in which this product resides is quite suitable for computing equipment. Now what I'm about to tell you is, BE WARNED!
I researched this and many other routers. I was looking for WAN, increasing my bandwidth for media serving in the house via dual band wireless and wired LAN with 4-port switch. The storage support it offered I thought was my stepping stone to a NAS. I already had a 500GB My Book to try with it. I read many forums and other comments on this and the WRT600N. Heat problems, likely influencing the wireless drop outs was the largest issue. However, I ran into many more.
Well to my surprise, I found the wireless MAC filter will not retain settings even after telling it to save them. They would stay in memory for a few days and then just drop the MAC address from its memory settings. I lost my communication from my WDS and had to go back in and enter the MAC again.
The storage is an abortion. After getting the MY Book connected and set up, many times the access through Windows Explorer would not work and I would have to reboot the router. I got frustrated with this router not retaining the saved feature settings and eventually I gave up on using them. A new QNAP TS-209 II now takes the official duties of NAS support. The WRT is not worthy nor worth the money in my opinion. Of course, I had the typical wireless drop out everyone else complained about. I believe the custom cooling package is order here. Too bad there are folks that will buy this not having the ability to fix a cooling/heat problem that will be forced to return it or deal with it.
I've thoroughly enjoyed usig my old WRT54G and WRT54GS. They served well, but the WRT610N is NOT as solid as the 54's were.
Customer Review: Very disappointing...
Summary: 1 Stars
I've always had Linksys networking equipment and never had any complaints. However, this router has been a major disappointing. I've been running it for 7 months now and besides the looks there's not much positive I can say. I'm not a network engineer but as a software developer I know enough to get by. Here is my experience:
1. 5mhz Range (N-only) at 20 ft away I get about 2 bars. So unless you plan on sitting next to the beauty, it's useless.
2. 2.4mhz Range (N-only) is acceptable but not nearly as good as my old WRT54GL that is still on the network.
3. Connections drop constantly. I'm talking about every 3-5 minutes when my son is on XBOX Live. Really takes the fun out of browsing. Takes about 2-3 minutes to reconnect after each drop. Can't even backup my laptop to the server over the wireless connection because of the instability.
4. USB Hard drive feature of the router is painfully slow. Almost an hour to transfer 7GB. Unacceptable and almost sad.
5. Under heavy load, the device turns into a space heater which is probably the source of the connection problems. Read some CISCO support comment that suggest to try to cool the device down with an external fan and see if it makes a difference. I thought to myself, send me the cooling fan CISCO and I'll give a try.
So, for $170 I got worse range and no improvement in performance as I'd expected from a G to N upgrade. On the flip side, as long as my son keeps playing XBOX Live, I can turn the heat down in my office.
I suppose I will get the 'Cooler Master Notepal U2 Notebook Cooler' for $20 and give it try. I'll update the review with the results.
2010/11/15 Update: I did end up getting the notebook cooler and placed the router on it and I also have made it a habit to reboot the router every Saturday morning. The dropped connection issue seems to be fixed now. Still not worth the trouble, money and aggravation.
Customer Review: This Is Not A Good Router!
Summary: 1 Stars
I don't write many reviews but I must write this one. I wanted to upgrade my router to the N series to have greater speed when using Netflix streaming. After reading the other reviews here, I knew my experience with the WRT610N was a 50/50 shot, but this router had everything I wanted. Realizing that my glass would be either half full or half empty, I crossed my fingers and bought this modem.
The set up was smooth & easy, and the software presented an attractive mapping picture. However,the range of the WRT610N was less than my Linksys 54GS router, which has been working without any problems for the past 4 yrs. While using the WRT610N, I could access the internet with my laptop while sitting in the kitchen, but could only get 1 bar. My Linksys 54GS gave me 3 bars consistently. After 2 weeks the WRT610N would not maintain a consistant wired or wireless connection. My wired Netflix connection in the family room kept cutting out almost every hour, and had to be reset. My wireless Netflix connection in the bedroom also kept cutting out about every hour and needed to be addressed. It drove my wife crazy and she was frustrated with me because I had fixed something that wasn't broke. I re-installed my Linksys 54GS, and my Netflix connections in the family room, and the bedroom are working fine again without any interruptions. My wireless connection in the kitchen is also at 3 bars again. I will admit though, while the WRT610N was working, my connections to Netflix was slightly faster.
At any rate I retunred the WRT610N to Best-Buy and got a refund. The WRT610N is not a good router. I got reduced range in a 4,000 sq. ft. home, my connections were only slightly faster, and my network had constant interruptions. I expected much more from this router considering Cisco now owns Linksys! I'm currently thinking about D-Link but will wait until we have an official N standard.
Customer Review: Nice Plastics, Not as Nice Router
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this router and installed it. It was to replace my DLink router that I bought about 3 years ago. I chose to "upgrade" to this router because the antennas are internal, and so my two year old son wouldn't be as inclined to play with the router. I also figured that a newer router would be faster and have additional features.
Unfortunately, I found the router to be quite difficult to install, primarily because of the PC software that is designed to help manage the Local network. The software frequently showed network faults that were non-existent, and even basic functions like upgrades seemed to not work very well. On top of that, it was not at all intuitive, and I've got over 10 years of network management experience.
As far as the router itself, it was surprisingly slower than my DLink from a few years ago. This was especially surprising to me because my impression is that for SOHO routers, Linksys is a better brand. Also, the administration web interface was not as clean and easy to use as the DLink that I had been using, and again not nearly as intuitive. For example, the default subnet is 192.168.1.x, but I prefer to run my networks on 10.32.x.x since I have a number of devices. Figuring out how to do this in the Linksys interface is not at all straightforward. One advantage is that it is easier to use a USB flash drive with the Linksys.
It appears that Linksys has attempted to simplify setting up and managing a SOHO network, but they've not succeeded as well as I would have hoped, and further, they've made using some more advanced features more difficult as a result. The router is also slower on the uplink/WAN side than it should be, and the dual wireless networks doesn't seem to do very well with Windows - you basically have to pick 1 and go with that. It does have nice plastics though...
Customer Review: Just got it.
Summary: 4 Stars
I just received the router... called Linksys support for set-up (India) to get it up and running b/c I was worried about the negative reviews.
Support actually was not that bad... got the router running... but didn't really help to "optimize" it. The girl only set up the 2.4 band and WAP... that was it. BUt she did get it working within 15 minutes.
NOTE: My router came with the latest firmware installed. Amazon must have a new batch of these now with all the updates already on them.
I currently don't have an N-card in my notebook... will when I get a new computer in August. But so far so good... with the new computer i hope to have everything working in "N" with no issues.
Fingers crossed.
P.S. if anyone could point me in the right direction as to what settings will get the most out of this router... that would be really appreciated. please comment or post a link in comments if you can. I really wanna get this router working to it's advertised potential when I have my -n card in my notebook.
4-stars until further notice.
9.14.2009
Still working without a hitch. In fact... pretty awesome. I have a CAT-6 cable running to the router from my modem (Motorola) ... and just connected my skype phone as well last night. All working fine. I did notice a slight drop in connectivity once ... I was as far away from the router as I could possibly be in my home ... but it still worked fine. Download speeds are blazing ... I was able to make wireless downloads at over 800 KB/s in wireless G. When I get an n-card in August ... I'm expecting to be much closer to maxing out my connection speed which is 20MB/s +
So far ... this is the best router I have ever worked with anywhere.
Stay tuned for more info as I get my n-card and test it all out.