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Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router

WRT54GL Wireless Router

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Most recent User Reviews for

Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router

  • Reviewed by: amln

    04-28-08

    Duration of ownership: 5 Months

    Strengths: Supports lots of features

    Weaknesses:unnecessarily costly. Netgear WGR614v8 is an opensource family router and quite stable and eady setup as well. But costs much less compared to the linksys product

    Overall Evaluation: I would recommend the WGR614v8. Do not fo r linksys router. It's time to switch to Netgear

  • Reviewed by: marcin12

    04-03-08

    Duration of ownership:

    Strengths: 3rd party firmware, good performance with optional firmware.

    Weaknesses:Linksys firmware

    Overall Evaluation: The wrt54gl is a good router with ok performance. The good thing about wrt54gl over wrt54gs and wrt54g that it can be flashed with 3rd part firmware without complicated procedure. I ran some test on speedtest.net with qos enabled router got 8ms ping compared to dlink dir655 7ms. Though router doesn't disconnect itself like dir655. Some people like wireless N router so don't. Compared to dlink dir655 wireless N router and wrt54gl with custom firmware, both have about same range. Dir655 has higher throughout rate but wrt54gl is more consitant.

  • Reviewed by: KGKD

    09-03-07

    Duration of ownership:

    Strengths: Performing well, I have a MAC and a PC both hooked up.

    Weaknesses:'Easy One Step CD' does not apply to MAC Users. Took several hours to make it work.

    Overall Evaluation: Now that it is working, I like it. However, would it hurt them to add MAC setup to their CD? My scanner has it.... My digital camera has it.... It took several hours to make it work right. On screen help was not all that helpful, and the phone support was not all that pleasant. The best thing I can say about it was that the wait was very short.

  • Reviewed by: jimmm

    04-22-07

    Duration of ownership: 1 Years

    Strengths: Seems to work OK when it's working

    Weaknesses:Gets corrupted easily

    Overall Evaluation: I bought this router about a month ago. Since then we have had two power outages. One was only about 3 seconds, but the other was a couple of hours. Both times it caused the router to stop talking to my cable modem. The first time I reset the router and the modem and it began working again. The second time that didn't work and I had to also, spoof the MAC number from the computer.The power was off for hours I unplugged the router until hours after it came back on so it wasn't a reconnect surge that did it, just a power loss.Tonight when I got home I switched outlets the router power module was plugged into - unplugged from one outlet and plug into my BackUPS power supply. This caused the router to lose its mind again - this makes three times in as many weeks. This time what I did before didn't fix it. I ran their "Adviser" utility [a fixit wizard], and after screwing around for 10-15 minutes it told me the internet wasn't working. No kidding, that's why I ran it in the first place.I called LinkSys tech support. They put me on hold for an hour and then disconnected. I called back and went through their tone jail again. This time I got a person who couldn't speak nor understand English. She'd never heard of Houston and had me spell it, then had me confirm it by spelling it back "h as in Hotel, o as in Oscar, . . ." She hadn't heard of FireFox, insisted I locate and start IE, and wouldn't accept failing to reach Google was a good test, insisting I try Yahoo. Then asked me to "get behind my screen." I tried about five times to figure out what she really wanted, but could never understand her and finally hung up.I've spent my entire Sunday evening trying to get this router working, after spending a whole morning a couple of weeks ago and 2-3 hours the second time it lost power, day before yesterday. Apparently any time you remove power from this router it goes belly up.I think it's too late to return it, but I'm fed up with it. I don't remember having any of these problems with my BEFSR41 in the seven plus years I used it.[Note added April 08] After one of these power glitches it removed my wireless security. I didn't realize this and my network was left wide open to all for several months.

  • Reviewed by:

    02-05-07

    Duration of ownership: 1 Months

    Strengths: Rock-solid reliability, ability to run upgraded open source Linux firmware, good connection quality

    Weaknesses:No "turbo" option

    Overall Evaluation: I received this router a few weeks ago, and promptly upgraded the firmware to OpenWRT. I also considered DD-WRT because it is more user-friendly, but since I am a tinkerer I went the more open route. WOW, what a difference over my Netgear MIMO router! That stupid Netgear dropped connections and sometimes just completely FREAKED OUT, meaning I would have to revert to factory settings and re-configure the thing. If this happened while I was at work, my wife was without internet all day long :( I finally gave it away to a relative, and I don't even feel good about that.With the Linksys model and open-source firmware, I am able to add features as I want them -- PPTP auto-dial networking to my office VPN, UPnP, QoS (Quality of Service -- a feature to load-balance different types of internet traffic), transparent proxying, detailed firewalling with start/stop times, etc.Plus, the connections are rock-solid and actually stronger than the Netgear MIMO, which has 7 internal antennas. Go figure. In short, I am very impressed, and will continue to buy Linksys hackable routers in the future.

See more user reviews »

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