wireless routers

Constant troubles, reboot every day. Support is patetic. Do not buy

As stated in many prior reviews here, the WRV54G is simply not ready for release as a consumer-quality product. My friend was looking for a wireless router with VPN, and he bought this one simply because it was the only such unit at CompUSA at the time. I have used many Linksys products before and have been very satisfied with their quality, so I initially thought it was a good choice. Boy, was I wrong.

The setup was indeed simple, and the unit was up and running in a few minutes. There were a few snags getting 128-bit encryption running, but overall the interface seemed pretty intuitive.

The big problem with this unit is reliability. Connected behind a standard cable modem, this unit loses its DHCP settings frequently (usually in a day or two, sometimes sooner, and at every reboot). When this happens, the connection to the Internet is gone. It's still possible to connect to the administration page on the router itself, though, at least usually. The only way to restore the DHCP settings is to go to the Status tab on the administration web site and click on the DHCP Renew button. Even power-cycling the unit doesn't work, as DHCP is always messed up when it reboots, but clicking the DHCP Renew button causes it to work again.

On three occasions, the wireless unit seemed to fail. Connecting to the router with an Ethernet cable, rebooting the unit through the admin interface, and manually renewing DHCP worked twice. One time, even connecting to the admin interface via the Ethernet cable failed.

My friend bought another unit to install at a second home, and had Comcast install the unit when they installed the cable modem. Of course, they left everything at default settings and did as little as possible. Once again, the next day, DHCP failed and the Internet connection was lost; only this time, hitting DHCP Renew still did not renew the address, nor did power-cycling the unit. Tossing the router altogether and plugging straight into the cable modem works fine, though, but of course that defeats the purpose of a router.

I can't review the VPN functionality, because it's never been stable enough running as a plain router to even begin worrying about VPN yet.

Upgrading to the latest firmware version did not help. My advice: stay clear of the WRV54G! If the issues are firmware-related, perhaps future upgrades will fix this unit. I wouldn't bet on it with my money, though.

As an IT consultant, I have always loved Linksys equipment for my small and medium business customers, they always seem to work out of the box, but yet have enough advanced configurations to make a tech geek happy.

Well time comes to purchase a Wireless Router for my home, so I can setup a VPN tunnel, when we install the VPN end point at the office later next month.

I open the box and setup the router, take a few minutes to configure it, clone MAC address, setup DDNS (wish it would support updating AD DDNS), and other settings. At first the DDNS wouldn't update, no big deal everything else is working.

36 hours later... turn on my Xbox to play a game of Mechassualt, DHCP isn't providing an IP, decide to wait until the next morning when I bring one of my laptops home. Sure enough couldn't ping the thing from work, it isn't assigning IPs, nor could I pull up the setup page. I hit the reset button, the modem reboots and starts working.

I then goto the setup page, lucky it kept all my settings, I then did the firmware update. Works fine for another 24 hours. I am getting really disappointed, tonight I am going to do a 30 second reset on the modem and will find out in 24 hours whether or not I will have to do an RMA.