Customer Reviews

Cisco-Linksys WRT310N Wireless-N Gigabit Router

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(54)

 

 

I might be a day late and a dollar short but as long as you stand the product up on it's side, there is no heat issue. If you either wall mount or mimic a wall mount by standing it on the side with the ports facing up you won't have a heat issue at all. If you lay it flat, you will have heat issues. I tried it standing up with the ports face down but it got hot. The vents for the heat to escape are on the side with the ports so if you face that side up then there is no heat issues.

Configuration was easy, features are great, range was good... until the device started gettng hot (or whatever) and started dropping connections and slowing down and had to be manually rebooted. Sometimes these "hang ups" would completely stop traffic even on the switched gig ethernet ports. After about 10 reboots in 20 days I decided it wasn't fun anymore and I'm trying something else.

Found my NetGear router dead (unsurprising after reading forums and reviews of the model I had), so I replaced it with this one. It was very easy to setup and it supports WMM (wireless multimedia) and QoS which was important to me since I have the T-Mobile Blackberry Curve that can do calls over WiFi. I did not install any software and had no problem getting this thing to work with my Macs and PCs -- however, I have had several LinkSys routers in the past, which made knowing how to set this up without installing software pretty easy.

Beware, what another reviewer said about this router not being a "true N specification". It is fully compliant with the latest draft standards. It uses MIMO technology (40MHz wide bandwidth), and operates in both the 2.4GHz and 5.2GHz spectrums. And it is true gigabit ethernet for wired devices (the spec sheet does state gigabit, several times actually. I checked the sheet, and I'm getting gigabit throughput between my two wired machines plugged into the router. It's also important to realize that gigabit is way faster than even the fastest DSL or cable modem, so that measure of speed is only relevant when communicating between 2 computers that are both plugged into this router via an Ethernet cable.) Buying this won't get you a faster connection to the internet.

UPDATE: This route is STILL working great for me. I've had it for 18 months now and not one hiccup. Most Linksys routers I've bought in the past would have died by now (for no apparent reason), but this one is still going strong. Works great with my MacBook, iPhone, and PCs.

Used this router for about 2 weeks before I returned it - the setup was easy and feature set / speeds are good - but wireless connectivity becomes intermittent after a few days of operation - then the wireless radio shuts down. Also to make matters worse the administrative web page errors out when the router reaches this state - only way out is to do a hard reset and setup everything again - but the pattern repeats...
Linksys support confirms they have had such issues with the router. YMMV. Try at your own risk.

Noticed a couple of errors in other reviewer's comments.

1) This IS a gigabit router. That doesn't affect the wireLESS capabilities at all however. It only comes into play for communication between WIRED computers plugged into this router.

2) This router is NOT dual-frequency. It is 2.4GHz only. One reviewer had that wrong. Dual-frequency router examples include Linksys wrt600n, Dlink dir-855, and netgear wndr3300.

In MY opinion, the router that is most similar to this router is the Dlink dir-655, thus the very similar price.

Good luck.

Initially, I was really excited about buying this wireless router but I got disappointed pretty soon. The wireless connection would be lost too often (around 3 or 4 times a week). Not acceptable. I previously owned a DLink 615 router which worked great. I'll return this item and buy a DLink 655 instead.

I gotten this WRT310N about 1 month ago. Everything was working perfectly well...initially....until problems appeared. Connection to my laptop was lost and I was unable to reconnect back to the router. I reset the router to factory default setting and even downgrade/upgrade the firmware. It just cannot work. I can see the network which I have created, but I just could not connect. No error messages in the computer management! Its gets really hot after about 10 minutes of usage. Best is to wait for Linksys to come up with a better firmware before purchasing this router.

My Wireless G quit working. I didn't want to mess with it anymore. So I hopped down to Office Max and bought this router. I intended to upgrade in the future anyway so this was my excuse.

Since I'm used to Linksys and also wireless, I figured this would not be much to install. I was right. It installed simply. I do suggest you put the CD in first and follow all the little rules. Even though you may know a lot about these things.

There is one mistake in the setup instructions. It tells you to put the cable from your PC into the Internet on the router. Wrong. The cable modem cable goes there. But you knew that. Right?

I also bought a wireless N adapter for my laptop, even though it's a wireless G machine. I'm glad I did. It works just great.

The speed between computers is just unreal! And the range is fantastic. I even feel that the Internet is faster. Oh, I know a router can't make the Internet faster. But it seems like it to me.

The speed difference between G and N is just out of this world. I'm very pleased with the router. Keep in mind, I just bought it today. So I may post an update.

But going from 57mbps to 135mbps is a real jump in speed. If you're ready to upgrade, go for this. You won't be disappointed.

-Susanna K. Hutcheson

I bought this router because my old one just didn't reach very far in my house. This hadn't been a problem before but I got a new Playstation that I wanted to reach in our living room.

Within no time after hooking this up, it started just disconnecting constantly - in fact literally as I just typed the first paragraph of this review, it disconnected for no reason and I'm soft resetting it now.

I phone Linksys to see what was up and the very first thing they said after getting the model name and serial number was that in order to do much I would have to pay some nine ninety five fee to get this direct connection software from them where they connect directly to my computer and I watch them fix it. I said no thanks, I'm returning this if I can't fix it for free, and the lady just kind of rambled about how I really should pay the ten bucks but she'd see what she could do.

Well what she could do was just to spend about 2 minutes getting me to click "clone MAC address" inside the admin screen for the product, and that was it, it didn't do anything and she just whined how they couldn't do anything without me purchasing the ten dollar package. Unbelievable.

I have purchased Linksys stuff in the past with no problem and received support from them over the phone but I guess that was a couple of years ago and these days they just are not doing support unless you pay.

Reading over all these reviews and others on the web, it's pretty clear that this product is just a bigtime dud, and it's a shame, I really thought Linksys was a leading brand and would be a safe purchase, but nope, it's a piece of junk.

I had a Linksys Wireless G band router for 2 years but the signal was a bit weak on the far side of my house (40 feet from the wireless router) so I "upgraded" to this Wireless-N router. As others have also found, the signal strength is WORSE than my wireless-G. Now my computer is virtually useless because I get kicked off every 10 minutes due to a lost signal. Definitely NOT worth the extra money - buy G instead.