Customer Reviews

Cisco-Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(52)

 

 

If you are considering this bridge to do video/audio streaming inside your house, think again. This review is based on over 2 months worth of testing this unit and then working with Linksys/Cisco trying to figure why it does not deliver. A saleperson at a local store may have told you that you can stream MP3s over your wireless network, or perhaps you have two DVRs in your house and your want to stream recorded TV shows from one to another. This is not the device you want to use for this purpose. Don't belive me? Ask Linksys level 3 support. Its architecture is not designed to support high levels of network traffic needed for streaming -- it has very small or zero I/O buffers to handle it -- as a result, the device will crash after 2-5 minutes of streaming. You can power cycle it and it will resume for the next 2-5 min. But forget streaming for a moment, WET54G crashed when I was simply working from home VPN'd into my company. Not for that either?! Do you think that WET54G ver 2 is better than WET54G ver 1? Been there, don't waste your time -- the architecture is the same. Alternatives? WET54GS5 might be better, but I'm yet to find that out myself. I know you want to try it yourself. Piece of advice -- buy at a retail store, and if it doesn't work, return within 30 days. Do not get into RMA exchanges with Linksys - unless you enjoy 2 months of 2-3 hours/day trying to get your money back.

I purchased a total of 4 of these units to replace a fleet of aging WET11 bridges (which I may add performed flawlessly in their years of service) at both my home and business. Immediately after setting them up I began to notice problems which required frequent rebooting of the bridges. After less than 24 hours, one of the units went completely dead and unresponsive, and since then one other has bitten the dust as well. I have wasted countless hours with Linksys support online, and was told that I should run WEP encryption on my network to help solve the problem, even though the main reason I bought the WET54G is because it supports WPA. Needless to say I returned all of the bridges for a refund. To make matters worse, now my old WET11 bridges are now also acting strangly (I'm guessing due to my WRT54G router's firmware upgrade that was suggested by the fine folks at Linksys).

I have long been a fan of Linksys even though most other people seem to put them down. However, this product on its own has convinced me never again to do business with Linksys. If you are in search of a wireless bridge, do yourself a favor and go with the Buffalo WLI-TX4-G54HP wireless ethernet crossover, or else look into a WDS system.

I bought this unit to replace my Linksys WET11. I was using the WET11 for my ReplayTV, but was converting all of my wireless network over to Wireless-G Only. Just so you know, I never use the CD that comes with these things. I just plug it in and view my router admin page to see what IP it gets (provided you are using DHCP). Then open a browser and type in the IP assigned to it. I have found this to be the easiest and quickest way to configure these. It takes about 30 seconds total. I am very happy with the WET54G - it works great with my ReplayTV, so if you have a ReplavyTV or a TIVO it should work fine.

Well, despite all the bad reviews I bought the linksys wet54g because d-link and netgear's bridges got equally bad reviews and I got the wet54g cheap ($71) on buy.com.

My box says version 3 on the bottom. Linksys's web site only mentions versions 1 and 2 so this must be quite new. I really hate linksys's versioning system because when you buy online there is no way to tell what version you are getting which can make a big difference because the different versions aren't firmware compatable. Mine has firmware 1.07.

On to the review: I bought mine to extend the range of my wireless because the linksys range extender sucks. WDS in general seems a bad idea because it is one radio doing both send/recieve so it immediately halves your bandwidth. I configured the WET54g to connect to my existing wireless and then placed the box where my laptop drops off to 20% signal. Because the WET54g is fixed I could carfully position its antenna with a reflector to get 85% signal to my WAP. Then I got a linksys WRT54g ($60) and set its wireless up as a different channel and ssid than my main WAP, and connected it to the WET54g by a 3ft ethernet cable. When my laptop is in decent range (>40% signal) of the WRT54g it connects through it and the WET54g to may base WAP and gives me 88% of the throughput my laptop would get when within decent range (>40% signal) of the base WAP. The same setup with the linksys range extender using WDS gave me 45% of the throughput, so this is a win.

When doing this testing I used the WET54g pretty hard and never had a dropped connection, which was the main complaint I read of the older versions. The other complaint of old versions was a weak antenna. Since I'm carefully positioning it with a reflector I don't really care, but decided to test it anyway. So I hooked the WET54G to my laptop by a 3ft ethernet cable and disabled the laptop antenna. Using the WET54g for my laptop wireless straight to my WAP gave me 10% greater throughput than the laptop's built in wireless straight to the WAP! This suprised me, but leads me to conclude that the WET54g antenna is as good or better than my laptop's built in wireless.

Overall I am very very happy with this purchase.

I was able to get the bridge up and running with my Sony Playstation 2 in about an hour. The documentation was a little misleading and tells you to use the setup utility to configure the bridge. Since my router is using WEP encryption on key 3 I couldn't use the setup utility since it only allows you to specify encryption on key 1. I recommend using the admin web interface utility to set up the bridge. Then things becmoe very easy. I have not had any connection problems with this like I have seen in the other reviews. One down side is that the is no new firmware update for the WET54G to allow for WPA security, which is currently available for the WRT54g (wireless router) and the WPC54g (wireless notebook card).

These units are pieces of scrap. we have 8 WET54G ver 1.1 units and all give flahsing power symptoms after snmp or UDP scans. Firwmare version 2.06 was supposed to fix this, BUT DID NOT. Linksys refuses to return money or send better/updated units...they will send 3 more of the same...what good is that? 3 more pieces of garbage is still garbage. Linksys support is also garbage....nobody knows anything, but I'll bet they're still selling this SCRAP aren't they?

Totally ticked off, and will never buy another LINKSYS product again...IF YOU'RE READING THIS LINKSYS, THEN TAKE HEED. YOUR REPUTATION IS TURNING TO GARBAGE..MY CASE NUMBER IS 2374421. THANKS FOR NOTHING

I had to replace my trusty old D-Link DWL-810 bridge with this Linksys WET54G when I upgraded my wireless network from 11b to 11g.

I'm an experienced computer professional and even I had some trouble getting the WET54G configured properly. By all means try running the Setup program that comes on the CDROM, but if it fails to detect the bridge then you are going to have to roll up your sleeves and set it up manually:

1. Make sure the Ethernet light is lit solid and the Wireless light is flashing. If they're not both on, then you need to recheck cable connections. Do not move to step 2 till this is fixed.

2. On the computer the bridge is connected to, open a web browser and try entering the "URL http://192.168.1.226" in the address bar. If prompted for a password enter userid "admin" / password "admin". Then the Linksys administration web page should appear. If so skip to step 6.

3. OK, the magic URL on step 2 didn't work for you, but don't panic. On the same computer open the Network Connections window. Right click on the LAN connection you normally use and click Properties. In the protocol list highlight "Internet Protocol TCP/IP" then click Properties.

4. On the General tab click "Use the following IP address" and then enter the IP address 192.168.1.101. Click OK twice to close the open dialog windows.

5. Return your attention to the Network Connections window. Is the LAN connection enabled now? If not, right click on it and choose Repair. Close the Network Connections window and return to step 2.

6. Once you're in the Linksys browser administration console, select Wireless and click Site Survey. You should recognize the SSID of your home wireless network on the list. Note the signal strength, then select it.

7. If your network has WPA2-PSK security enabled, click Security Settings and enter the shared key passphrase. If not, and your router supports WPA2, then go to the router and turn it on! Older WEP security no longer works against hackers.

8. Open a web browser on the same computer and enter the URL of a web site that you have not visited in the last month. If it comes up then your bridge is working! If you get an error then continue on to step 9.

9. Try right clicking on the LAN connection icon down in your system tray (lower right corner by the clock display) and choose Repair. Then close all browser windows, open a new browser window, and once again try the web site from step 8. If it comes up then your bridge is working! If you get an error then continue on to step 10.

10. Restart the computer. While it's rebooting, press the Reset button down on the WET54G and hold it down for about half a minute. Then try the web site from step 8. If it comes up then your bridge is working! If you still get an error then I'm osrry to say it's time to call Cisco / Linksys tech support. :-(

Let me say that I've been very happy with most of the Linksys products I used over the years, both wired and wireless, including my current wireless G router and PC card. However, along with the wireless B USB adapter I tried a few months ago, the WET54G did not quite live up to expectations. I couldn't communicate reliably with the device pure and simple. When I could access the bridge via it's ethernet or wireless connection either my browser would time out, or more commonly, I would get some of the web setup page, but with script errors or only partial information about the setup. When I could communicate with it, the reliable range was less than 30 feet direct line of site with no walls in between. I couldn't even stream mp3's reliably from a PC connected to it unless the bridge was within 10 feet of my WRT54G router. I second Tim Higgins excellent review at smallnetbuilder.com about it's limited range and hope that a firmware fix is in the works. Until then, my server PC will have to stay connected to my router via Cat5.

I currently have an 802.11b network and WET11 from Linksys. The system works great. When I read the bad reviews here I thought that it couldn't be true. I am writing to assure everyone that the bad reviews about this product are absolutely on the money. Poor connection, slow speed (slower than 802.11b if you are farther than 20 feet away), buggy software and no WPA! Do not buy this product. I had just purchased all new Linksys hardware to upgrade to 802.11g. I am returning it all. It's too bad - I have been turned from a Linksys supporter to a detractor. Now if there are any other wireless hardware manufacturers reading this - make a 802.11g wireless bridge. I will buy your bridge, router and notebook adapter right now. Good-bye Linksys!

I really needed a wireless "G" Bridge to boost a signal where hard-wiring was not an option. I couldn't wait for Linksys to come out with a "g" signal booster. If you can wire or wait, do so. If you can't, here are some things I did to make this buggy thing work. You need to be pretty tech savvy to get the job done.

I was hooking up the bridge to a wireless Linksys G access point ("wap").

To setup the bridge, I attached it to my Linksys G router. I initially got a System Error/IP Conflict message that made my network unusable. Tech support was not much help. I ended up attaching it to my network via a low-tech hub (I removed the hub later). The error went away and I could start programming.

I set the WAP, bridge, and router to the same SSID. Tech support gave inconsistent advice on this.

I put the WAP and router on different wireless channels. Tech support gave inconsistent advice on this as well.

On the WAP and every other wireless device OTHER THAN the router, I filtered out the MAC address of the bridge. This way, the bridge would only pick up the wireless signal from the router. If you have multiple access points on your network and need for the bridge to pick up the signal from an access point closer than the router, you would apply filter to the router too -- basically every wireless transmitter EXCEPT the one you want the bridge to pick up.

Once the setup was complete, I connected the bridge and the WAP (filtered, of course) to each other using the ethernet cable. I moved the bridge and its attached WAP to their final destinations and plugged them into their AC power. At this point, I abandoned the hub I used for setup. Please note, the bridge needed to be fairly close to the unfiltered transmitting device in order for it to work consistently. The attached WAP can go anywhere its cable will reach.

At this point, every thing "pinged," but not consistently. My last move was to play around with the channels of the unfiltered transmitting device until I found one that worked best.

One last pointer, this configuration required endless unplugging/repowering of the WAP and bridge. If things aren't working, be sure to try repowering before throwing in the towel

I nearly lot my mind doing this project. If my blood, sweat, and tears over this helps you then perhaps it wasn't a complete waste.