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HomeNetworking DevicesCisco-Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge |
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|  | | | Customer Reviews: | | | Average Customer Review: ( 159 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
63 of 64 found the following review helpful:
 Linksys/Cisco:"NOT FOR STREAMING, NOT for VPN..." Nov 24, 2004
By YourMileageMayVary
If you are considering this bridge to do video/audio streaming inside your house, think again. This review is based on over 2 months worth of testing this unit and then working with Linksys/Cisco trying to figure why it does not deliver. A saleperson at a local store may have told you that you can stream MP3s over your wireless network, or perhaps you have two DVRs in your house and your want to stream recorded TV shows from one to another. This is not the device you want to use for this purpose. Don't belive me? Ask Linksys level 3 support. Its architecture is not designed to support high levels of network traffic needed for streaming -- it has very small or zero I/O buffers to handle it -- as a result, the device will crash after 2-5 minutes of streaming. You can power cycle it and it will resume for the next 2-5 min. But forget streaming for a moment, WET54G crashed when I was simply working from home VPN'd into my company. Not for that either?! Do you think that WET54G ver 2 is better than WET54G ver 1? Been there, don't waste your time -- the architecture is the same. Alternatives? WET54GS5 might be better, but I'm yet to find that out myself. I know you want to try it yourself. Piece of advice -- buy at a retail store, and if it doesn't work, return within 30 days. Do not get into RMA exchanges with Linksys - unless you enjoy 2 months of 2-3 hours/day trying to get your money back.
37 of 39 found the following review helpful:
Run far, far away from this Apr 19, 2006
By Andy
I purchased a total of 4 of these units to replace a fleet of aging WET11 bridges (which I may add performed flawlessly in their years of service) at both my home and business. Immediately after setting them up I began to notice problems which required frequent rebooting of the bridges. After less than 24 hours, one of the units went completely dead and unresponsive, and since then one other has bitten the dust as well. I have wasted countless hours with Linksys support online, and was told that I should run WEP encryption on my network to help solve the problem, even though the main reason I bought the WET54G is because it supports WPA. Needless to say I returned all of the bridges for a refund. To make matters worse, now my old WET11 bridges are now also acting strangly (I'm guessing due to my WRT54G router's firmware upgrade that was suggested by the fine folks at Linksys).
I have long been a fan of Linksys even though most other people seem to put them down. However, this product on its own has convinced me never again to do business with Linksys. If you are in search of a wireless bridge, do yourself a favor and go with the Buffalo WLI-TX4-G54HP wireless ethernet crossover, or else look into a WDS system.
34 of 38 found the following review helpful:
 Excellent Replacement for WET11 Feb 22, 2006
By Book Reviews Weekly
I bought this unit to replace my Linksys WET11. I was using the WET11 for my ReplayTV, but was converting all of my wireless network over to Wireless-G Only. Just so you know, I never use the CD that comes with these things. I just plug it in and view my router admin page to see what IP it gets (provided you are using DHCP). Then open a browser and type in the IP assigned to it. I have found this to be the easiest and quickest way to configure these. It takes about 30 seconds total. I am very happy with the WET54G - it works great with my ReplayTV, so if you have a ReplavyTV or a TIVO it should work fine.
20 of 21 found the following review helpful:
I think they got it right in version 3 Dec 01, 2005
By E. Bina
Well, despite all the bad reviews I bought the linksys wet54g because d-link and netgear's bridges got equally bad reviews and I got the wet54g cheap ($71) on buy.com.
My box says version 3 on the bottom. Linksys's web site only mentions versions 1 and 2 so this must be quite new. I really hate linksys's versioning system because when you buy online there is no way to tell what version you are getting which can make a big difference because the different versions aren't firmware compatable. Mine has firmware 1.07.
On to the review: I bought mine to extend the range of my wireless because the linksys range extender sucks. WDS in general seems a bad idea because it is one radio doing both send/recieve so it immediately halves your bandwidth. I configured the WET54g to connect to my existing wireless and then placed the box where my laptop drops off to 20% signal. Because the WET54g is fixed I could carfully position its antenna with a reflector to get 85% signal to my WAP. Then I got a linksys WRT54g ($60) and set its wireless up as a different channel and ssid than my main WAP, and connected it to the WET54g by a 3ft ethernet cable. When my laptop is in decent range (>40% signal) of the WRT54g it connects through it and the WET54g to may base WAP and gives me 88% of the throughput my laptop would get when within decent range (>40% signal) of the base WAP. The same setup with the linksys range extender using WDS gave me 45% of the throughput, so this is a win.
When doing this testing I used the WET54g pretty hard and never had a dropped connection, which was the main complaint I read of the older versions. The other complaint of old versions was a weak antenna. Since I'm carefully positioning it with a reflector I don't really care, but decided to test it anyway. So I hooked the WET54G to my laptop by a 3ft ethernet cable and disabled the laptop antenna. Using the WET54g for my laptop wireless straight to my WAP gave me 10% greater throughput than the laptop's built in wireless straight to the WAP! This suprised me, but leads me to conclude that the WET54g antenna is as good or better than my laptop's built in wireless.
Overall I am very very happy with this purchase.
35 of 40 found the following review helpful:
 Works Great! Setup a bit confusing. Jul 01, 2003
By Steven Cagney
"montee4"
I was able to get the bridge up and running with my Sony Playstation 2 in about an hour. The documentation was a little misleading and tells you to use the setup utility to configure the bridge. Since my router is using WEP encryption on key 3 I couldn't use the setup utility since it only allows you to specify encryption on key 1. I recommend using the admin web interface utility to set up the bridge. Then things becmoe very easy. I have not had any connection problems with this like I have seen in the other reviews. One down side is that the is no new firmware update for the WET54G to allow for WPA security, which is currently available for the WRT54g (wireless router) and the WPC54g (wireless notebook card).
See all 159 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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