Reliability and Service Report Card

Wireless Gateways

Go wireless, but go patiently. That's the advice we gleaned from readers who told us about their experiences with gateways for wireless home networking. Gateways can be persnickety devices, and they fail more often than any other peripheral. Complicated software and security issues sometimes foul up installations and make troubleshooting difficult. Moreover, vendors don't always give sparkling service.

The nature of wireless networking and the potential for unstable drivers ensure that everyone will have a unique experience. Your colleague's great results with a gateway from a particular company does not guarantee that you'll have a similar experience. Everything from your 2.4-GHz cordless phone to the layout of your home or office to the other wireless gateways in your neighborhood can cause trouble with connections and quality.

In our survey, Netgear topped the gateways chart, with users judging its overall reliability as Good. A fair number of readers struggled with home networking kits right out of the box and during setup. Among the six types of devices that we asked readers about, wireless gateways rated worst on this measure.

Finicky Device

Photograph: Ann StatesMany wireless gateway owners who encountered an initial problem or one significant problem were able to enjoy the benefits of networking once they got beyond the original sticking point. This holds true for Stephen Swift of Alpharetta, Georgia, who had a tricky setup experience and a reliability problem with the Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless gateway that he purchased in the past year to connect several home PCs and a laptop.

Installation instructions were far from straightforward, says Swift, a director of sales for The Ramsey Company, a manufacturing firm. "Certain cues that were supposed to come up never did." He eventually managed to muddle through setup, but then he had to call for help when he couldn't get two PCs on the network to talk to each other. Linksys referred him to Microsoft, but instead he consulted a friend in the IT business, who helped him fix the problem. "It would have made my life easier if Linksys had shared some basic Windows networking information," Swift says.

But the real trouble came just two weeks later, when the gateway died. "The replacement process could have been easier, too" Swift says. "Linksys acknowledged immediately that the product was defective, but it took them a couple of weeks to send the new one." That said, he is now more pleased than you might expect.

Linksys has made some changes. Over the past two years, the company expanded its call center facility and trained technicians to provide both basic and advanced levels of support.

Belkin received the worst reliability marks among gateway vendors in our survey, earning the only Poor overall reliability score. About 40 percent of respondents said they felt either neutral about or dissatisfied with the reliability of Belkin's gateways.

Dale Cabell of Irvine, California, a network designer for the county of Los Angeles, had bad luck with the Belkin F506130 Access Points he used at home. He noticed that the product case got very hot during operation, and the device gave out within the first month of use. Belkin replaced it under warranty without much fuss, says Cabell. But after three months the replacement unit failed. "So I quit using Belkin."

Belkin says that it has made a number of changes recently. Since 2003, the company has been more closely tracking the reasons for tech support calls and returns, says senior product manager Gary Hansen. In March 2003, the company began shipping an Easy Install application with gateways; this software analyzes the PC and Internet connection and fills in much of the ISP-related information for the user during installation.

Simple Fix?

On the service front, our readers gave just Fair ratings across the board for Netgear, D-Link, and Linksys (the only vendors for which we had enough responses to calculate an overall service score). What can vendors do better? Make setting up wireless networks easier, thereby cutting the number of service complaints, says Kurt Scherf, vice president of research at market research firm Parks Associates.

One of the top issues: Most manufacturers have yet to create a truly easy-to-use wizard for configuring security settings on a wireless network. "That's been one of the biggest complaints about wireless networking products," Scherf says. The new WPA (Wi-Fi protected access) security protocol, available on some newer home networking products, may improve the situation. Meanwhile, people planning to install a wireless gateway must brace themselves for potential problems.

See our survey results for wireless gateways.