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I was planning on starting this post off nicely and without vitriol, but I don’t think that is going to be possible.  I currently own a Linksys WRT54GS2 router and thought I was going to be happy with it, but now I am disgusted with Linksys altogether.  Here is the story behind my new boycott for Linksys and all of their products.

Since I started working with home networking, I have used Linksys for my routers.  The main reason for this was because of brand recognition and some reviews I have read about their products.  I had a Linksys WRT54 for a very long time, but I had to get rid of it when WEP got hacked.  I have told countless friends to purchase Linksys products as well, and I never had a problem with doing so either.  That was, of course, until I purchased the WRT54GS2 router.

I came home and installed the router like any other and thought I was fine.  I got on my PC and Mac, which are wired, and everything was super fast as expected.  Then I decided to try setting up a WPA AES wireless environment.  That was when I realized that my connection speeds were ridiculously slow.  Not only were my wireless speeds slow, I was also having problems on the desktop machines.  They were now running slow and at first I thought it was because of my ISP throttling me.

After tons of investigation and speed tests, including DNS speed comparisons, trojan checks, and checks for network compromises I realized that the speeds were fine if the laptops were not actively sending outside data packets.  That was when I thought it was a bug in the implementation of WPA2 on the router.  I reset the router to a factory clean shine and still had the same problems.  My final conclusion is that Linksys has hosed the wireless interface for this router version.

I have been online for days now and I have seen countless people baffled as to why their speeds were so slow.  I had no other option but to write a blog post and hope that others find and read it.  I have vowed to never again purchase a Linksys router, or any other Linksys product.  I am going to go out tomorrow and purchase a Netgear router and say farewell to Linksys for good.  Additionally, I will be informing everyone that I come in contact with, and who asks me for advice, to never buy Linksys products.

I have installed firmware updates, disabled IPv6, shut down IP Helper services, turned off windows tuning protocols, and tested packets using wireshark.  After all this I have to say that the Linksys WRT54GS2 is crap and I can’t trust any other Linksys routers.   Buy Linksys products at your own risk.

Tags: Computer Help, Rants