Thursday, October 11, 2007

Why not to buy a Linksys WRT55AG (and Linksys in general)

I recently bought a wireless router from Linksys, the dual-band WRT55AG. It's by far the worst wireless router I've seen.

The firmware is outdated, it takes almost a minute to power-cycle and it drops the connection at least 3 times per hour. If I try to use something like P2P to download OpenOffice or the fabulous game PlaneShift, after a while (15 to 20 minutes) the connection to the Internet will simply stop working. Most of the time I'm still connected to the router, and I'm able to reset it by connecting to the web interface and saving some unimportant configuration change; but sometimes the Laptop <-> router connection drops and I can no longer connect without power-cycling the WRT55AG.

What's even weirder is that when I'm not able to connect, my operating system complains that I don't have the correct pre-shared secret (PSK). Obviously this is a fault at the router side, since it's the same PSK I use all the time.

I've tried everything suggested at the Linksys forums, such as reducing the MTU, throttling the P2P client speeds and amount of connections, updating the firmware... All of that to NO AVAIL.

After seeing the same problem with different models from Linksys (such as the WRT54G, but many others too) and after posting on the Linksys forums and talking to their Costumer Support, I decided that Linksys simply doesn't give a damn. They won't fix their routers line, and they decline to acknowledge the problems.

Linksys used to be a good brand and their products used to be quality products. But now I see them as just a phony brand used to push us into higher grade network products (Cisco, don't hide yourself). No quality products anymore.

For the time, I would recommend anyone to select different brands for networking equipments.

I defy Linksys to prove that the problem is on my setup, and not on their crappy hardware!

Sorry this is not related to Brazil or politics, but I had to vent my frustration...

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