Customer Reviews

Cisco-Linksys Wireless-G Cable Gateway (WCG200)

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(99)

 

 

This combo cable gateway and wireless router seems like a dream come true. Instead, should you fail to heed my warning and purchase this item, you'll be subjected to a nightmare that will only end when you seek another wireless solution.

As a cable gateway the WCG200 performs as expected. Setup with my ISP (Cox in southern California) was a breeze. I was up and running in no time.

Wireless connectivity, however, has been an absolute nightmare. None of my devices (laptops, bridge, print server) will stay connected for any length of time. When the router is performing well, I'm lucky to stay connected for an hour. When the router is performing poorly I can barely stay connected for 15 seconds.

The Linksys forums are crowded with other users reporting the same problem. I've been unable to find any official acknowledgement or response from Linksys.

Do yourself a favor and avoid the WCG200. You will regret purchasing it.

The WCG200 V2 still has several software/firmware defects, the most annoying of which is dropped connections several times a day. To restore communications, a cold boot is required.

The convenience of an all-in-one solution is outweighed by the time wasted in reestablishing connections. If you telecommute using SSH or Telnet over VPN then DO NOT BUY THIS ITEM.

This is exactly what I have been looking for and it certainly helped in eliminating the extra plugs and ethernet cables running behind my desk (linksys cable modem, 4 port router, wireless access point AND a switch since I needed ONE more port). Now I have everything connected to this unit and don't need anything else extra. The USB connection is nice and actually gives you 5 ports instead of 4 on the router (4 ethernet ports + 1 USB).

The biggest improvement I think I see is the configuration part of the unit which you access via browser. More control over security and settings! As a person who knows how to capture hack attempts made on my network or suspicious activity made against it (most seem to try to access by ftp'ing onto my linux server), this one helps further protect your home LAN by making your network 'undetectable' by means of pinging that must hackers use to find exposed networks and ports. People with kids would probably like the part where you can block access to certain websites and even keywords. It can even disconnect certain computers from the network at hours you specify.

The only gripe I had was with amazon.com itself. The pricing is among the highest ($171.95 at time of writing) and I submitted a form that showed a competitor beating their price but after a week, they have not still budged on their pricing. I bought this from buy.com for $139.49 and the shipping, like amazon.com, was free.

Don't buy this product if you do anything other than surf the net. It can't handle anything complicated. For example, telnet/SSH and accessing an IMAP mail server. Such connections freeze up if they are left idle for
more than a minute or so.

I found this out after much finger pointing between Comcast and Linksys and countless hours on the phone with inept customer service agents. Linksys finally admitted that the product is indeed defective in this regard and that there is no known solution.

[original review May 2006]
If you are lucky, you will get a good unit that will work fine with your cable provider. If you are unlucky like me you will spend hours trying to get multiple units to work.

The first unit arrived from Amazon with parts rattling around inside - needless to say, it did not work.

The second unit dropped all wireless connections about 2-3 times per day. A reboot of the modem was required to bring things back up.

Linksys tech support replaced the unit, so I am on my third one. It does the same thing as the second.

There are no firmware upgrades available. Linksys says to get them from my ISP (Comcast). Comcast says to get them from Linksys.

There are many other people on the web experiencing the same symptoms I am.

[review updated July 2006]
Amazon took back the gateway and gave me most of my money back - I must say I am impressed with Amazon's service. I now rent a wireless gateway from Comcast - it is only $5/month and works perfectly. I think this is a much better way to go than buying the hardware given all the frustrations I had.

I purchased this to replace a failing cable modem, and I'm very impressed. Had it up and running within 10 minutes of opening the box. Wireless works great, no problem. It doesn't support WPA, so if you're going to do anything interesting with the wireless (i.e. banking or shopping) you should use the 128bit WEP, turn off the SSID broadcast, use MAC address restriction, and change the key every couple of weeks. It's still vulnerable, but most attackers will go after a softer target. Overall a great device.

I normally don't like to write bad reviews; however, I'm compelled to do so for the Linksys WCG200 version 2 due to the chronic instability of the device.

I'm truly sorry I bought this device and I'm frustrated at Linksys since they do not appear to be offering any firmware updates to fix the issues.

Both my wife and I work from home, so device outages are readily apparent. We have a Comcast broadband connection that has proved reliable since we got it in 2001. Until we bought the WCG200 , we were using separate devices for the cable modem, router, and wireless functions and decided to upgrade to the WCG200 since it has all three functions integrated.

Below is a list what I have observed in the last 4 months of using the WCG200. I've found several Internet posts that detail similar issues for other folks. There seems to be a correlation of these issues with Comcast users; however, that may not be conclusive since Comcast has such large market share.

1. Frequent crashing of the device when wireless users are connected. The device will often stop responding and require a reboot. When we're using its wireless capabilities this occurs several times per day. If we don't use the wireless, the crashes still occur; however, they are markedly less frequent. I've also noticed that changing the wireless security settings seems to change the frequency of crashes. The device would crash hourly when using WPA or WPA2 security.

2. The administration pages stop responding after the device has been running for some time (usually about a day or two). In this case, the unit will still process traffic; however, I must reboot it to get into the administration interface.

3. The administration pages (when working) sometimes stall for 30-60 seconds.

4. The modem log doesn't always work properly. I've cleared the log and had old entries come back after a reboot.

To be fair, Linksys does make other devices that work better. I've been a Linksys customer for several years...while I've seen quality issues before they usually come out with a firmware upgrade to address them.

I have had this gateway for over a year and it drops the wireless connection whenever one downloads a bigger file or connects to some retail web site (the connection is dropped, and I have to reset the box for no discernible reason). I thought it might be my internet provider, until a friend complained of the same problems, which he solved by swapping to a different gateway. I would not recommend this product.

I purchased the WCG200 from Best Buy for two reasons: one, because I have had a good impression of the Linksys WRT54G wireless AP/gateway router, and two, between the $[...] mail-in rebate and $[...] gift card, it was free. The WCG200 is also the unit that Comcast provides as part of their "Wireless Home Networking" package. Installation and configuration is easy. For six months I had pretty steady service but noticed a few limitations:

- TCP connections that are idle more than a couple of minutes will mysteriously vanish. For example, a telnet or SSH session, left at a prompt for two minutes without input, would stop responding and eventually time out.
- My PSP refused to associate with the wireless AP unless I put it in B-only mode. Mixed mode would not work.
- Port forwarding was easy to configure but limited to the same port on the inside and outside of the router. Could never get it to accept more than 10 or eleven inbound connections at once, and many connections would mysteriously drop.
- No option for WAN connectivity besides the internal cable modem. No chance of changing type of service or upgrading to newer technology.
- No control over the firmware. Cable company is able to login to the box and view your settings (see how many computers are connected) even if you change the password and have remote management turned off.
- No "official" way to reset the modem through the web interface. Power cycles take too long for the box to reboot, reestablish its WAP, and reconnect to the cable system.
- Quickly refresing the web interface causes the WCG200 to crash and reboot. This is consistent, repeatable behaviour. Bring the status screen up in Firefox or IE, then press F5 about 20 times within 10 seconds; the WCG200 will crash and reboot.
- Three times the WCG200 has reset itself to factory defaults, including default password and a running open, unencrypted WAP with the default SSID of "linksys".

After six months, I started experiencing a degradation of service and lots of problems with it dropping the cable system. This started with maybe one drop every couple days, then once or twice a day, to complete unusability at times. Called Comcast and with two onsite service calls, they replaced all the wiring, splitters, and connectors from the hard line to the box and could find no problems with their signal. My digital cable box had no problems. However, the WCG200 would keep losing sync and resetting, sometimes once an hour, sometimes every few minutes. Sometimes after a reboot it will reestablish connection, other times it requires a power-cycle.

Further investigation revealed the dropouts only occurred during constant wireless traffic. Using wired ethernet produced no dropouts at all. My guess is the wireless radio is somehow interfering with the cable modem radio. I have tried leaving it off for a good period of time and resetting it to factory defaults. Even called up Linksys technical support and waited an hour to speak to a foreigner who could barely converse in English and said I had to tell Comcast to upgrade my firmware but couldn't give me a firmware version number. I asked Comcast to upgrade the firmware and they replied that it was at the latest revision Linksys would provide to them.

Although Linksys has a 3-year warranty, my experience with the device has been less than pleasing. Instead, I have since purchased another WAP and turned the wireless service off on the WCG200. The dropouts have stopped, and the new WAP will let the PSP connect in mixed mode without forcing it to 802.11b. The new WAP is also noticeably faster overall for web, SSH, and gaming, and also has much better wireless signal quality throughout the house. I will need to invest in a new cable modem to get around the TCP timeouts and port forwarding limitations.

Conclusion: you get what you pay for (in my case it was almost free). Might be adequate for the basic household that wants to get on the internet and add wireless right away, especially if the reliability can be improved. Any computer- or network-savvy users without a very limited budget should consider something else, preferably separate WAP and cable modem devices.

This product has too many issues to even consider purchasing. This is my second all-in-one cable modem, gateway, wep device, the other being the Motorola SURFboard® SBG900 Wireless Cable Modem Gateway. I replaced the Motorola with the Linksys due to technical difficulties, lack of support from the cable company and finger pointing between Motorola and Adelphia. Support issues are even worse with Linksys and I will be trashing this unit and replacing it with a seperate cable modem and wireless gateway. The big issue with seperates is rebooting the seperate units in correct order due to power failures in my area...buying a UPS to solve this issue and moving away from the combination units.