Rating: Summary: LINKSYS BEFSR81 EXPERIENCE Review: I bought a BEFSR81 and worked fine for about month and a half. Then begun to experience connection drops 2-3 minutes, every day more frequently. One night it dropped connection 3 or four times within an hour and then WAN port stopped working. It was connected to a Cisco 575 VDSL provided by my ISP. Extensive check out with ISP tech support pointed to the BEFSR81 router. I returned it to my supplier for tech support but couldn't make it work. I bought a second BEFSR81 and guess what...never worked either! Then I bougth a D-LINK DI-604 and a BEFSR41. BEFSR41 had again a connection drop at the fourth day, I had to reset it. D-LINK is been working solid, not even a glitch. Hope this be useful for Linksys buyers, since, for worst, Cisco -now the owner- said not to support Linksys gear. I emailed LINKSYS support at support.la@linksys.com No replay at all.
Rating: Summary: Limited lifespan Review: I bought this router and it worked perfectly out of the box. However after about 9 months the router failed with the Diag Light on solid. Unpluging and a hard reset did not correct the problem. I shipped the unit back to Linksys and they promptly replaced the unit. This unit also worked perfectly out of the box. However after about 5 months this unit has also failed with the same problem. The Diag Light is on solid. This time I'm out of warranty. I fear that this router has a limited lifespan and plan to buy a different brand.
Rating: Summary: Great initially - flaky after a year Review: I've had this router installed in our home network for almost a year. It installed quickly and easily and performed flawlessly for nearly a year. However, recently we'd started to experience frequent connection drops to the Internet. Down for 3-5 minutes, then back up, several times an hour. Network troubleshooting pointed to the router, and after reading some of the comments here and other places, I replaced the Linksys with an SMC Barricade. Our connection has been solid ever since. Most of the components in our home network are Linksys products, and they've always installed easily and worked great. It does worry me though that they too might have a limited lifespan.
Rating: Summary: Unreliable to the point of being unusable Review: BEFSR81 features are great, such as port forwarding. However, for a year or so this router has crashed unpredictably, on the order of once/day, requiring a trip to the basement to reset it. Linksys tech support was useless if well-intentioned. Note that Linksys hasn't updated the firmware for this product in years, it's effectively an orphan. After the router crashed five times in a row within a half hour recently, I broke down and bought a new 8-port "Barricade" router from SMC (SMC7008ABR). Installation was a little tricky but now it's up and running fine. Too early to claim success.
Rating: Summary: No Brainer Review: This Cable/Router with 8-Port Switch is a breeze to install, configure and use. I had my computer up and running within 10 minutes of unpacking the product. It took about 5 minutes to configure each of the other 5 computers on my home network to see the local network and connect to the Internet. When my son wanted to connect to on-line games and needed to open some non-standard ports, it was easy to do through the web-based interface. This product works as advertised. That's the best endorsement I can give to any product.
Rating: Summary: You could do better Review: I owned this unit for about 2 years and it worked but as mentioned in some of the other reviews it locks up every so often. Because there is no reset button easy to access (there is a tiny recessed button on on the back) we ended-up unplugging the unit a lot. Eventually the power connection became flakey and the unit began powering down randomly. The software is also not that nice--they released few new features in the firmware and a few releases back they tried to add firewall capability that they yanked out in the next release, never to return. I replaced it with the SMC Barricade 8 Port 10/100 Mbps Broadband Router which is a superior product (see my review for brief comparison).
Rating: Summary: Switch to the Best! Review: Been using Linksys routers for several years. I am network engineer, and while these are by no means Cisco routers, they are very affordable and perfrom great for home or small business networks. **Be careful of the new security/filtering feature for AOL. This option is worded strangely and the wrong choice will block Internet access. Suggestion--don't waste your time with AOL, get a real ISP.
Rating: Summary: Mine works great as a switch, but not as a router + switch Review: Prior to purchasing this Linksys product 2 weeks ago, I was very satisfied with Linksys and owned a number of other Linksys products, including a KVM switch, wireless access point, wireless LAN card, and 1-port Cable/DSL router. I bought this product because I wanted an 8-port switch. The fact that they had a combo DSL/Cable rouer + 8 port switch convinced me to buy this product since I could save space and power, and I would also be able to use my 1-port router for other stuff like creating a separate subnet. However, I had problems with this product when I replaced my 1-port Cable/DSL router with this one. I had to reset it (unplug and re-plugged in) multiple times per day. Finally I gave up and went back to using my 1-port DSL/Cable just starting using this thing as an 8-port switch. Since then, I haven't had any problems with this product. From reading other reviews, this doesn't seem like an isolated issue. Linksys looks to have a defective product, and there are no firmware updates available (yet) on their website.
Rating: Summary: One-of-a-kind features! Review: Not only great at the basics but the *only* model from any vendor I can find that offers QOS (Quality Of Service) by port. What that means is you can set one computer (or other device) to have higher priority. Great for video games, voice over internet, or a home or small office LAN to make sure the right application/devices get enough bandwidth. I don't think even Linksys realizes how importaant this featue will soon become.
Rating: Summary: Pretty good little box - just a couple things Review: Easy setup. It took me about 30 minutes. I use my router on home network with 4 computers, a printer server, and wireless bridge. This router is connected to my Alcatel DSL modem. For general use (meainging websurfing, SSL, VPN, FTP) this router works great. On occasion, this router will hiccup, and stop routing network data. This only happens when I'm really taxing it. To be specific, when I'm having online game parties (3~4 computers) connected to an outside server, this router looses it. It's annoying, but it's easily fixed by unplugging and plugging it back in. Like I said, if you're not hosting network parties at your place, then this is a great router! NOTE: Definately make sure the firmware in this router is up to date. Linksys is pretty good about releasing fixes for this router.
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