Linksys WRT54G2 Wireless-G Broadband Router

Over 500 reviews, and 78% of them (as of now) are 4-star or better. There's not much else to add that hasn't already been said.

I've been using this router for three months. Set up took a whopping five minutes (at most). Enabling some extra features (MAC filtering in particular) took a little extra time & effort, but nothing significant. It has been running non-stop w/o any problems or loss of signal ever since. I even connected wirelessly with my laptop from the garage and the backyard, probably 12 and 15 yards from the router, respectively.

I recently made the big mistake of purchasing a NetGear wireless-N gigabit router. What a waste of money. Unless you were in the same room as the router, it would continually lose the wireless connection (when using wireless-G adaptors)... and I'm not talking once in awhile, but all the frickin' time! I had to go back to the Linksys router for reliability; and trust me, this is one reliable unit, as I would expect anything from Cisco to be.

However, because of the above disaster I discovered a really neat feature of this Linksys router. It has two modes of operation. The primary mode is for use as a gateway, where it connects directly to your broadband modem; the second mode allows it to be used strictly as a router. So I'm currently running the Linksys unit in router mode and have it hard-wired into the NetGear unit that I'm using as a gateway. This way I have a reliable wireless-G network via the Linksys router that won't drop signals, while having wireless-N and gigabyte ethernet capabilities with the NetGear unit. The NetGear unit--and hence I assume many other routers on the market--does not have that second mode of operation.

And do you know what else is a really nice feature of this product, but probably one of the most overlooked because it's not a "techie" thing? The router isn't cumbersome. It has a sleek design, low profile, and no external antenna(s) to ugly up a room.

Bottom line: This is a 5-star product and I highly recommend it. Once it's set up, you can pretty much forget about it while it does its thing. The only downside? No on/off switch. But hey, my cable modem doesn't have one either, nor the NetGear router I mentioned. It's a personal thing, but I hate technology that doesn't come with an off switch! :-)Get more detail about Linksys WRT54G2 Wireless-G Broadband Router.