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Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge

Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge

List Price: $264.00
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great Product, but Pricey and Hard to Setup.
Review: I've read a lot of complaints about this bridge, and I'm glad I didn't listen to them. I've been able to get 1 Mb/s transfer rates through the bridge(I've been transfering large files). The bridge is not in the same room, and the signal has to go through 2 walls at least 50' a way. I think this is an excellent product, although its very pricy. Some of the other brands over much cheaper bridges, however they might not interoperate well with your router. The G bridge was able to give me a much more stable xfer rate than my B bridge was able to.

Now for the bad stuff. It is a pain to setup, a lot more painful than the linksys B bridge. Its probably best if you don't use the setup cd and just connect to it via the browser to set it up. It doesn't work real well on a mixed network(g and b). I had to change a couple settings on my router to get in the 1 Mb/s range.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Worst Piece of Equipment I've ever bought
Review: If I could have given it zero stars I would have. These devices are fairly easy to set up and get a network connection going, however it is VERY slow. At best I get 180 Kbit/s - that's about 25% as fast as the 802.11b (11Mbit) bridge I was using before. I complained to Linksys, they could do nothing and said a firmware upgrade was on the way.
Firmware upgrade was release and it killed both of my WET54Gs. Waiting to hear from linksys.
These are the same problems everyone seems to be having.
Save yourself a headache (and hours of your time) and NEVER EVER buy a WET54G, better yet never buy a Linksys - that's what I plan to do.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Linksys/Cisco:"NOT FOR STREAMING, NOT for VPN..."
Review: 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.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Is Amazon shipping WET54G hardware version 1 or version 2 ?
Review: It seems that version 2 fixed most bugs, as well as introduced WPA encryption (firmware downloadable from Linksys web site).
Does anyone know whether recent Amazon orders are shipping V1 or V2? The 03 stars ratings are assuming V2.
Thanks.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Still a work in progress
Review: Let me say that I've been very happy with most of the Linksys products I used over the years, both wired and wireless, including my current wireless G router and PC card. However, along with the wireless B USB adapter I tried a few months ago, the WET54G did not quite live up to expectations. I couldn't communicate reliably with the device pure and simple. When I could access the bridge via it's ethernet or wireless connection either my browser would time out, or more commonly, I would get some of the web setup page, but with script errors or only partial information about the setup. When I could communicate with it, the reliable range was less than 30 feet direct line of site with no walls in between. I couldn't even stream mp3's reliably from a PC connected to it unless the bridge was within 10 feet of my WRT54G router. I second Tim Higgins excellent review at smallnetbuilder.com about it's limited range and hope that a firmware fix is in the works. Until then, my server PC will have to stay connected to my router via Cat5.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: WET54G. unit trashed by firmware upgrade
Review: Out of 3 units, 2 were trashed beyond use (flashing power light)
by the LinkSys firmware upgrade.
Cisco should have taken hold by now and not permitted such
atrocious programming.

The WET11 bridge has its own quality assurance problems,
but is nothing close to as bad as the WET54G

The one good unit (on firmware version 2.05) locked up and
needed rebooting after a week sitting around not doing much.

I cannot belive a company would be willing to risk its reputation
with such shoddy products...

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Completely Disappointed
Review: Review of the LinkSys WET54G bridge point, and WRT54GS router

Completely Disappointed

("two Stars", both for the support, and none for the products)

These LinkSys wireless device both failed utterly. The WET54G was replaced, and the replacement failed identically.

Who will repay me for my lost time, and productivity? Noone.

I have used LinkSys wired devices for years, and have found them reliable. This is why I purchased the LinkSys WRT54GS wireless router and WET54G bridge point despite their higher price, and negative reviews.

I must start by saying that LinkSys gets full points for the fine women and men in India whom they employ as their technical support staff. While I have mixed feelings for the socioeconomic ramifications of the North American jobs being outsourced to India, I must say that the general level of courtesy and expertise was higher than I have ever experienced before. Kudos to India for training such superior technicians who can work so much more cheaply than North Americans. In all, I spoke with eight LinkSys support technicians, and seven of these were from India. The Senior Support technician I spoke to in the end was in California, and he was also most excellent in his demeanor and knowledge.

That said, the devices don't work.

At first, I thought the router (WRT54GS) was working, and that I was experiencing signal drop out on the Bridge point side (WET54G). There was some initial contact, but it faded quickly to nothing. I suspected that the doors between the two points were affecting the radio signal, or that the local airport was interfering. Bringing both devices into the same room didn't help, though, and the airport shuts down at night - removing that as a source of interference. The senior support person I spoke to suggested that my wireless phones (also operating in the 2.4 GHz frequency range) could be interfering with the LinkSys products, but it made no difference when I disconnected them.

The Bridge point (WET54G) repeatedly power cycled itself - establishing a link for a few seconds, up to a few minutes, and then mysteriously shutting itself off, and losing the link. This happened every few minutes forever, and eventually it failed to find the wireless connection at all. It just sat there turning itself on again, and off again. After speaking to several technicians in India, I was advised to have the Bridge point replaced. The replacement failed identically.

No amount of tweaking, configuring, upgrading, or resetting makes it work for more than a few minutes. The failure is unrelated to distance between the nodes, time of day, version of the firmware, temperature of the product, OS of the host machine, or any other feature I may discern. It simply does not work. In fact, the two of them failed identically.

I had thought that at least the router (WRT54GS) was working, but I was wrong.

The router functions (or it's supposed to) as a 4-port wired router with a wireless connection. I was attributing the failure of the wireless connection to the Bridge point (WET54G). It took me a while to suspect that the wired connections to the router were perhaps failing sometimes as well. When I did notice that the configuration web page on the router was sometimes inaccessible through the wired ethernet port, I upgraded the firmware (on the advice of the local senior technician). This didn't seem to help, and in fact I then found that there was a complete failure of the wired machines to ping the router.

Unfortunately, when I re-reinstalled the firmware (guessing that the first reinstall had perhaps failed partially), the wired connection to the host failed in mid-upgrade, leaving the firmware corrupted, and unfixable. (There was no firmware to tell the machine how to upgrade the firmware - a sad state.)

The unit started lame, and died completely. Dead, dead, dead.

LinkSys has offered to replace the units, and to replace the bridge with the more recent version (WET54GV2), but I have declined the offer. At best, the units were sometimes working - transmitting with a 50% packet failure rate, which is unusable for me (and most people, I suspect). I now realize that I will fare much better with a trench, and a buried cable to my garage. Ironically, I had initially opted for the wireless equipment on the notion that it would be quicker and easier than digging a thirty foot trench. That was three painful weeks ago. I am now looking gleefully at the trench as the cheaper, quicker, easier, and more reliable option.

After having been a happy and loyal LinkSys customer for years, I am sad to say that I am utterly disappointed with my most recent experiences.

What a major drag. I am very frustrated. If you need speed, and reliability in your network solution, I strongly advise you to seek another solution than LinkSys Wireless devices


Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Works great.
Review: The first thing you need to do is upgrade the firmware with the latest version available in the linksys web site.
I have it connected with a Kiss DP-500 player's ethernet adapter, and it can play divx and mpeg movies across the wireless network (video files are located in my PC's hard disk, this PC is connected to the switch by 100 Mbps ethernet) with no problems.
By the way, my wet54g is placed about 12 meters away from my wrt54g gateway, with 2 walls in between.
The one important thing that is missing in this product is WPA security. Hopefully Linksys with release another firmware with support for it.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Do NOT buy this Linksys WET54G!
Review: The Linksys WET54G is a nice looking product, but it fails to connect effectively and consistently. (I have a Linksys WRT54G wireless network and a Linksys WPC54G notebook adapter card that I am very happy with). I attempted to install WET54G using WinXP, install CD failed with an error message BMCP.dll. I then attempted to install on Win2000, install got further but install failed due to "link lost" with WET54G. I gave up on the install CD and manually configured the Linksys WET54G using Internet Explorer on 192.168.1.226. I completed config, but it was extremely difficult to get the WET54G options to match my Linksys WRT54G which is the wireless station. Eventually I got a signal, but Ethernet on the WET54G kept dropping or was very, very slow. Finally I tried to reset the WET54G using the reset button. Now the power light flashes green but does not stay lit steady. This product has potential, but Linksys programming is sloppy and failed too many times. I returned this product as it does not work as advertised.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: HORRIBLE RANGE DO NOT BUY!
Review: The range on this is horrible. I have a wireless laptop card 1 floor below this and it works fine, yet the bride doesnt work good on the 1st floor. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS!!


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