Linksys WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router

Other products by Linksys

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 9.6 x 3.5 inches ; 2.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000FDOWQK
• Item model number: WRT300N
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (156 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 2, 2006

Product Description

From the manufacturer

The Wireless-N Broadband Router is really three devices in one box. First, there's the Wireless Access Point, which lets you connect to the network without wires. There's also a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100 Switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices together. Finally, the Router function ties it all together and lets your whole network share a high-speed cable or DSL Internet connection.

The Access Point built into the Router uses the very latest wireless networking technology, Wireless-N (draft 802.11n). By overlaying the signals of multiple radios, Wireless-N's "Multiple In, Multiple Out" (MIMO) technology multiplies the effective data rate. Unlike ordinary wireless networking technologies that are confused by signal reflections, MIMO actually uses these reflections to increase the range and reduce "dead spots" in the wireless coverage area. The robust signal travels farther, maintaining wireless connections up to 4 times farther than standard Wireless-G.

With Wireless-N, the farther away you are, the more speed advantage you get. It works great with standard Wireless-G and -B equipment, but when both ends of the wireless link are Wireless-N, the router can increase the throughput even more by using twice as much radio band, yielding speeds up to 12 times as fast as standard Wireless-G. But unlike other speed-enhanced technologies, Wireless-N can dynamically enable this double-speed mode for Wireless-N devices, while still connecting to other wireless devices at their respective fastest speeds. In congested areas, the "good neighbor" mode ensures that the Router checks for other wireless devices in the area before gobbling up the radio band.

To help protect your data and privacy, the Router can encode all wireless transmissions with industrial-strength 256-bit encryption. It can serve as your network's DHCP Server, has a powerful SPI firewall to protect your PCs against intruders and most known Internet attacks, and supports VPN pass-through. Configuration is a snap with the web browser-based configuration utility.

The incredible speed of Wireless-N makes it ideal for media-centric applications like streaming video, gaming, and Voice over IP telephony, and gives you plenty of headroom to run multiple media-intense data streams through the network at the same time, with no degradation in performance. With the Linksys Wireless-N Broadband Router at the center of your home or office network, you can share a high-speed Internet connection, files, printers, and multi-player games, and run media-intensive applications at faster than 10/100 wired network speeds, without the hassle of stringing wires!

Product Description

The Wireless-N Broadband Router is really three devices in one box. First, theres the WirelessAccess Point, which lets you connect to the network without wires. Theres also a built-in 4-portfull-duplex 10/100 Switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices together. Finally, the Routerfunction ties it all together and lets your whole network share a high-speed cable or DSL Internetconnection. With Wireless-N, the farther away you are, the more speed advantage you get. It works great withstandard Wireless-G and -B equipment, but when both ends of the wireless link are Wireless-N,the router can increase the throughput even more by using twice as much radio band, yieldingspeeds up to 12 times as fast as standard Wireless-G. But unlike other speed-enhancedtechnologies, Wireless-N can dynamically enable this double-speed mode for Wireless-N devices,while still connecting to other wireless devices at their respective fastest speeds.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

214 of 226 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars You can get it to work, but not without help..., May 16, 2006

By	Small Forest "lionpol" (McKinney, TX) - See all my reviews

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.

77 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Do NOT buy this router!, January 18, 2007

By	Oz Survivor "Oz Survivor" (Lenexa, KS USA) - See all my reviews

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.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing effort from Linksys, May 25, 2006

By	Goofus_n_Gallant - See all my reviews

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.... :-(