- Average user rating: 1.5 stars out of 82 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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3 out of 3 people found this review helpful
0.5 stars
"Linksys totally blew it"
Pros: Combines all the functions of the things I need for SOHO networking.
Cons: VPN does not work at all! Well if you spend a tone of time on it it sort of works.
Summary: This product is a cruel joke. Its $180 cost seems inline with what I expected for the feature list.
As a router it seemed to do fine and I can't really think of any issues that occured with the WAP parts.
BUT THE VPN. Now the VPN abilites was the selling point of this unit. Be able to access the netowrk from on the road.
Well it just plain didn't work. Linksys quick VPN would show me as connnected but nothing really passed in and out of the tunnel. Once connected I could not map network drives nor see the net bios. All I could do was ping the IP addresses. This took hours to get set up.
Now Linksys is supported by poor english speakers at the 1 and 2 tech levels. But they are usually helpful.
As soon as I said VPN I got put on hold and kicked up the tree. Finally level 2 told me that level 3 would call me back in an hour. ITS BEEN 7 DAYS. I call everyday and see if I can get level 3 on the phone am just told, "they will call you."
Various clients like greenbow are supposed to make it possible to actually use this thing. Well greenbow is from a French company and you have to buy it. As soon as I installed it I got blue screen of death errors. Took a hour to dig it out.
COnnect a BEFSX41 to the WRV54G and all sorts of things go wrong. My trusted router suddenly starts rebooting for no goood reason. Plus it never managed to secure a tunnel to the WRV54G. I connected it to another BEFSX41 is a matter of minutes.
I hours and hours spent on this WITH NO HELP AT ALL FROM LINKSYS. Never got calls back and learned off all the problem siwth the unit from www.linksysinfo.org. Where some people have some success after weeks of messing with this thing.
The reason I tend to use linksys gear on jobs is bacause I have teh User Interfaces memorized and I can trouble shoot them on the phone without needing to look at them. This experiance has made me seriously consider if I ever want to buy another linksys product again.
(I have had issues with other linksys products in the past. Like the now unsupported WMA11B software that dies thanks to XP incompatabilites and looses playlists with no fix insite or planned. The finiky WRE54G that only works consistantly with WRT54Gs and WAP54Gs. But the point is once you know about this issues it is not that hard to mix and match with what actually works. But the support for the WRV is beyond bad.)
BTW: Last week when I bought the WRV54G BB had 10 of them on the shelf and a sign pitching the "connect from the road". When I returned it yesterday there were none and no sign. I can only hope its because they pulled the product and not that everyone eles is going throught the same crap I did.
- 1 reply to this review
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I am a computer consultant and have purchased 2 of these routers. One failed (started power cycling) less than 12 hours out of the box. Even before that the performance (with regards to VPN), and phone support were zero. The first support call was 60 minutes before I even got asked an intelligent question. This is the first time with Linksys that support was actually rude. I think they are dealing with a lot of upset customers.
Where to buy
Wireless-G VPN Broadband Router:
$300.99
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$300.99 | See Site |
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