Customer Reviews

Cisco-Linksys WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(56)

 

 

The WRT300N works flawlessly "out of the box" in wired configuration. It does not work at all "out of the box" in wireless mode.

Now, having made that harsh statement as if it would apply to every user in every case, some qualification is certainly in order.

I unpacked the router and took extreme care to follow the setup instructions PRECISELY.

I was connected to the internet the second I finished running the configuration utility from the installation CD - but the catch is that the setup utility has to be run with an ethernet cable connected.

Once I removed the cable and tried to connect to the internet in wireless mode - the end of the line had arrived. There was no connection. Period.

I could connect to the router via its built in config (HTTP) utility and I could ping the default gateway (in the router) but I could not get past that point.

After a couple of hours of fruitless trial and error, I gave up and called Linksys tech support. You know what that means - you get to talk to a person who knows next to nothing about computers or routers. But, they do have their scripts to follow and if you are patient with them and endure the mindless, mostly just plain useless instructions they give you and don't offend them, they will eventually let you talk to a Tier Two person who actually does know something about routers.

To end a very long story with a quick summation, after reaching the aforementioned Tier Two person, I learned that there are arcane, obscure settings buried deep within the router's config menus that you will never find without help (and even if you did find them by accident, there is no chance you would know what to do with them). After changing 5 of those settings, the wireless functionality magically worked and I was connected.

The router is fast. My cable provider only grants me 8 megabit service and the router handles that with ease - wireless or wired.

This would be a 4 or 5 star appliance if it arrived on your desktop with working settings. I doubt that anyone who is not a Linksys or Cisco Systems engineer will actually be able to get it to work in wireless mode without a call to Linksys tech support - unless those units manufactured more recently than mine (April 2006) are shipped with valid settings.

Normal users can stop reading here, but for those who are interested in the technical details, here is a summary of the settings I had to modify in order to get the thing to work:

Router web admin page - Applications & Gaming - QOS - Enable "WMM" and Enable "No Acknowledgement" (the factory default settings are "Not Enabled")

Router Admin Page - Wireless - Advanced Wireless Settings - "Fragmentation Threshold" was changed to 2304. "RTS Threshold" was also changed to 2304. The "Beacon Interval" was reduced to 50 from its factory default value of 100.

Here are a couple of sincere questions for you. Even if you are a "Power User" would it have occurred to you to check your Beacon, RTS and WMM settings, among others, when you realized that you did not have wireless connectivity? If you say "yes," would you really have known WHAT settings to replace the defaults with?

Other than that, it's a really nice router.

**Update 5/21/06**
After using the router for a few days now, I have some follow-up comments to make. Several times a day my laptop will "lose" its IP assignment from the router. Right-clicking the wireless connection in the systray and electing to "repair" the connection restores the IP address, but that is a real bother and it should not be necessary. This never happened with the wireless router I replaced with the WRT300N. I suspect Linksys will be releasing a series of firmware updates for this model until they finally get all the "quirks" (let's not call them bugs) worked out.

I didn't have any issues setting up the Linksys WRT3000N. I plugged it in, configured the router via wired connection, once I confirmed the firmware was up to date I switched to wireless and everything worked just fine. I did not install the software that comes with the router, because it is not necessary, it's just more bloatware. All you need to configure the router is the default IP address. The hardest thing was remembering how to configure my TIVOs for a new wireless network. I've had an old Netgear wireless router for about 4 years that was failing, I got the Linksys to replace it. The Linksys range is at least twice the size. I now get signal in parts of the house that used to get either weak or no signal. Can't wait for summer to be on line outside without having to move the router out the window! I will update this review if I have any issues.

Has several known issues, one which may be fixed by firmware but not sure about the others. I am currently using the very latest available firmware from the linksys site.

The first issue is the inability for many wireless clients to reach some Web sites, among them google.com! There's a QoS setting you can change that helps some, but not all, wireless clients. Perhaps there will be a firmware update that will fix that.

Two other problems include the constant dropping of signal by some wireless clients, and an absolutely atrocious range with a dramatic corresponding loss in speed.

Is that something that can be fixed with programming or is that purely a problem of bad design? I wouldn't have the expertise to know and no answers from Linksys have been forthcoming.

My current Linksys 802.11g router--the WRT54GS--runs RINGS around this thing!

I e-mailed a request for information to Linksys last week. They e-mailed back that they working on the problem, but since then...crickets.

Amazon, you will be receiving a package from me soon.... :-(

First of all, I am a dyed-in-the-wool techie. I design products like this in my job. I know what every single one of those "what the heck is that?" settings in router set up screens are. So I do take a bit of umbrage when one reviewer called the many (most) who have had trouble with this router "MORONS".

Yes, I got it to work. It will work right out of the box IF used with most pre-N wireless cards and, definitely, if they are Linksys pre-N cards. That covers about 1% of those who would buy this router. After three hours of tweaking a dozen plus of the settings from default, I succeeded in getting it to "hand-shake" with b and g mode cards most of the time. It would still randomly lose the IP requiring rebooting everything. Not something my customer would accept nor would I sell.

Some of the techie specs are a long way from what Linksys claims. Linksys marketing obviously wrote the specs and ads then engineering tried to design to both. They failed. A non-techie spec important to everyone is range. It has 20% the range of an old b mode Linksys router I had sitting right next to it. Adding encryption dropped range in half again! The wired router portion of it works out of the box, no adjustments required. But you're buying this for the wireless function.

Yes, I could have tweaked some more and probably managed to get it stable enough to live with. But Linksys didn't used to be that way. I used to buy only Linksys considering my time worth too much to putz around with unreliable equipment to save my customers a few bucks on hardware. This is the third Linksys router in a month (the other two were g mode) that have been unstable or DOA. Then why did I buy this one? It was on sale and I wanted to give Linksys one more chance before they lost my business for good. They've now lost it for good. I exchanged the router for a Netgear and it worked right out of the box into a network running both b and g mode wireless network cards. Plus it was a lot less money.

Has Cisco ruined Linksys? Got me. Did all the good engineers cash out? I wouldn't be surprised. Are they rushing unfinished bug-filled product to market to meet quarterly profit numbers for Wall Street? You bet! I'll stick with Netgear and Belkin from now on.

I usually find user reviews useful, I have noticed that folks prefer to post their complaints about a product, while the happy ones like me stay quiet. Well time for a change.

This router replaced a Belkin Pre-N router for the following reasons:
- Its Web interface/CPU processor was slow when it performed my requests.
- It lost connectivity to the internet and it did not detect that. Hard resets were required.
- Finally, the router performance went downhill. A dial-up modem would have been just as fast. This was a tough one to debug as I just switched from DSL to Cable. I root caused the issue to the router and verified it was not a configuration issue. The problem existed on both wired and wireless. Belkin customer service while courteous and good, confirmed my findings and were going to send me a replacement. However, I got tired of waiting for the RMA to be approved and sent the router back to the store I bought it from. I used my 5 year old wired linksys router to rule out the DSL/Cable internet problem.

So I decided to shell out the extra few dollars, and put Linksys back into my network, and its worth every dollar I spent.

This router worked right out of the box if you use a wired connection. For the folks that are whining about having problems with the wireless aspect of it, well let me say that I guarantee all these folks bought a Wireless N router to be used in either a Wireless G or B environment. Well guess what, it won't work out of the box and you do need to tweak it. I for one bought it despite the fact that my network is a mixed G and B in anticipation of me getting an N wireless adapter.

The issues I had were mistakes by me inputing the wrong mac filter of my wireless adaptor, but as soon as I corrected that, and chose the correct mode: BG Mixed, everything around the house popped up. The range is pretty good, but do not expect the range to be phenomenal unless you use the N protocol. The nature of G and B radio waves will not travel as far as what can be done with N.

Compared to Belkin, the Web interface is super fast, the router does not reset everytime you change a major config such as WEP, mac filtering, password, etc. Whereas the Belkin would want to reset on a dime to enforce its policies which really is painful if you are trying to figure out your network config.

The feature list is very rich, you can install some pretty advanced policies to limit network access. You can even do it by time of day, imaging that after school and up till bed time, web browsing can be restricted! It has some neat security features, such as a stateful packet inspection, active x prevention while web browsing(protects you from hostile websites that can initiate activex sessions which internet explorer is susceptible to). As with any security feature you can really lock things down, so my recommendation is if you enable it, test your ability to visit the sites and run the applications you use after each change to make sure you did not shoot yourself in the foot. It makes network debugging easier.

So in summary I would buy this device again, and the only reason I did not rate this a five star is because I am very picky, and unless this router churned ice cream and read my mind and new exactly what to configure in my network without telling, then only then will I give it a five star rating :)

I read the reviews after getting home with the box and was shocked at the variety of opinion on the product here at Amazon. I did a little digging on Linksys' site. There are two models of this product, 1.0 and 1.1. The 1.1 product came out in early June 2007. The notes on the firmware upgrades on the linksys site for the 1.0 version of the product are truly scary. Lots of nasty bugs fixed (no idea how many were not fixed). If you just bought the 1.0 version (label on bottom of product, no indication on box as far as I can tell), take it back and wait for 1.1 stock to show up.

Long short, the 1.1 version fired up fine for me. I'm a techie but I followed the directions anyway (!). The setup wizard ran fine. I configured WPA (not WPA2 -- I have a device that doesn't support it). Other than that, all default settings. Works great on MacBook Pro (with wireless N), 2 Lenovos running XP Pro (G) and an HP (G). Solid, reliable connection for all of them. Excellent signal strength compared to the ABG router it replaces. Speed is excellent (4Mb down) and I get at least 2x the distance.

I wish I had the same experience as the person that rated 5 stars; but quite the opposite for me. This is not my first wireless router. I have experience with an 802.11B router of which I never had any problems. I wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Let's just say this one may be the latest; however anything but greatest.

I've spent countless hours, and days, on several different calls to tech support and the wireless still will not connect to the internet. It connects to the router with excellent signal strength, but will not connect to the internet. I experience this connection problem with both the PCMCIA card WPC300N notebook adaptor and also with my Cisco Aironet a/b/g card in my other laptop. Neither will work wirelessly. If I hardwire to the router it works perfect, but then what's the point of a wireless router if you need to hardwire?

The tech support people don't seem knowledgeable. Another issue is the phone connection to tech support. They are located in the Philippines and the phone connection is sometimes poor and my call has been dropped more than once. That is frustrating alone since you have to wait quite awhile to talk to someone. When the calls were dropped some of the technicians call back and others don't.

The tech support reps will make recommendations which don't work and may be incorrect recommendations. When talking to another technician they apologize for the suggestions of the other person which they admit was wrong. For example one technician told me to plug the PCMCIA card in before the software even though there are stickers all over the product to install software first. This was probably on my 7th or 8th call. The next day another technician needed to walk me through uninstalling everything and apologized of the wrong information given the day before.

I could spend hours writing about the experience and suggestions of tech support to get this product to work, but the bottom line is it still doesn't work. My pc equipment is not the problem. I'm running XP on all machines and the oldest laptop (a high end Sony) is just at 2 years old. For some reason this router just doesn't work wirelessly. My suggestion to you is to wait until they work the bugs out of this one. I hope this was help to you in making a decision. Someone seemed to be happy with this and gave 5 stars. I suppose they must work for Linksys, or it may have worked for them??? Give it a shot for yourself. I would love to know if others have the same experience. If you 'do' buy this please send your feedback. I would love to know your experience.

I invested over 6 hours trying to get this really nice looking router to work! Nothing! Other than just sit there and look nice it did nothing! I tried connecting this to my XBox 360 and nothing! I called XBox 360 support and tried everything for almost an hour and nothing! My laptops & PDA'S detect my network, but cannot connect either! I called Linksys Customer Support and they told me to call XBox 360, Sony, Motorola and HP to have all my devices adapters configured to work with this router! Can you believe this? As I told their rep, this thing should be set up with a minimum of time and hassle without the necessity of my having to call all the manufacturers of my wireless devices! Unfortunately, this is the second time I have had a similar experience with Linksys, only that the other wireless router was the one with the SRX400 built into it! I am definitely taking this to the store and getting a different brand! Beware, looks are deceiving!

I have had a wireless home network for several years now, the first incarnation coming along with the advent of 802.11G technology and at this point I have several different "generations" of technology represented within my network.
I still have my first D-Link desktop card, a newer Dell laptop with a G card installed. an Xbox, a PS3, a Sunrocket VOIP Gizmo directly connected to the router and another desktop configured as an HTPC also directly connected to the router.
I tried everything D-Link has in the way of "N" routers, up to and including their top of the line DIR-655 with varying levels of problems including; inability to have differing security levels on my different devices and inability to have my VOIP service Gizmo behind the router which is something I absolutely demand.
When I finally gave up and expanded my search, I went with Linksys because Sunrocket has 2 Gizmos, 1 being made by Linksys and I figured if all else failed, I could ask them to replace the Gizmo I have with the one from Linksys, hoping that would eliminate compatibility issues.
The Gizmo is an NAT device and the WRT300N has a specific setting to allow or deny NAT traffic. I checked the box, the phone works, end of story. Whereas my older D-Link router allowed my older receivers to run at simple WPA security and those capable to take advantage of newer WPA 2 security, the new D-Links just could not do this requiring me to lower the security level of ALL connected equipment.
With the Linksys, I again have the ease of running WPA 2 security while the router allows my legacy cards to access with basic WPA.
My Intel wireless on my laptop shows the signal level in the taskbar and while the D-Link always showed "full" reception, the Linksys will vary from full to 2 and even 1 bar of reception at times. However, while I had difficulty sitting on my patio with the D-Link and would have to move and adjust until I could get a usable signal, the Linksys has been able to supply a solid signal anywhere I've gone on my property, regardless of the "level" indicated in the taskbar. The only exception would be if I go down the street, the bar will drop to zero and so will my ability to access my network.
The bottom line here is, for me, the WRT300N did what 3 other routers could not. Namely, it brought me, my 3 PC's, my gaming systems and my phone service over to the new 802.11N technology. On top of that, it did it with as little fuss as I could have possibly hoped for, making me sorely regret all those wasted hours trying to get the "other" stuff to work.
It seems the biggest complaints regarding this router are quite old. Perhaps the newer firmware upgrades have addressed the worst issues. All I know is, it works just fine for me.

I purchased this router for my office (I am the system admin here, so computers are 2nd nature to me). I purchased the netgear wireless-N gigabit router for my house. Let me tell you, it is night and day. The netgear crashes at least on a daily basis and sometimes hourly, which requires me to go down to my basement and restart it constantly. Reguardless to say I'm replacing the router in my house with this linksys that I have never had one single problem with since day one in my office. It never crashes and the wireless on it is at least twice the range of the old wireless-G we had here. Even with security enabled. We got the router a few weeks after it was on the market and over months the thing needed a restart maybe twice. The netgear that is supposedly better and newer crashes constantly, so if you think the small problems with this router are bad, I suggest you try a Netgear to really experience some problems.