Linksys WRT610N Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router Reviewed

[Albatross]

It appears Amazon has it for $149 right now. I'm very tempted. I've officially Given Up Hope that my WNDR3300 will ever be anything more than "just barely livable".

Unfortunately, Amazon is also quoting a 3-5 week shipping delay.

Geo,

Circuit City is selling for the same price with free shipping (tax in most states).

 

[thiggins]

Same guy probably...anyway what have your results been?

Read this part of the review.

 

[thiggins]

Just read the 600N had problem with USB storage sharing (haven't read enough to know which though...). Have you done any testing with this unit?

Also, if I insert a 16GB USB key that can read up to 30MB/s, will I get full speed or the router for some reason will make that slower?

I already answered this in an earlier reply to you in this thread.

 

[Daniel]

I already answered this in an earlier reply to you in this thread.

hmmm... I remember I had asked this while not registered but it never showed up so no, I see no reply about this.

 

[thiggins]

Sorry, Daniel. You're correct. The posts were not enabled. They are now.
http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showpost.php?p=1280&postcount=7

 

[Daniel]

Sorry, Daniel. You're correct. The posts were not enabled. They are now.
http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showpost.php?p=1280&postcount=7

Ha! I knew something was wrong but you know, I thought you had your own reasons... now we see a bunch of new (old) message.

 

[Albatross]

Newegg now has it for $149.99 & free shipping

 

[RogueSpear]

I am on my second WRT610N now and am seriously contemplating a return as my 14 days are coming to an end. The first unit I got seemed to have had a faulty 5Ghz radio as it did not work at all. The second unit seems to "work", but it certainly isn't what I would call robust.

My wife and I each have an iPhone and we each have Dell XPS M1530 laptops with an Intel 4965AGN. Additionally we have a Wii, PS3, and a Brother MFC-9840CDW connecting via 802.11g. Here are my observations over the last ten days or so:

• Both iPhones constantly have problems connecting to the network, yet they pick up the weak signals from neighboring networks. When connected they will often lose their signal and it is sometimes impossible to reconnect. When connected there seems to be DNS issues (my best guess).
• Both laptops, the Wii, and the PS3 will periodically lose their signal completely.
• The signal strength for b/g is dramatically less than my old WRT54G v3.1.
• The signal strength for a/n on 5Ghz is good pretty much for only the room the router is in and maybe adjacent rooms. Forget about going through ceilings and floors.

Other than that it's great I think the main thing Linksys has going for it with this particular model is that there really isn't much competition at the moment for a dual band / gigabit router. In the end I'm likely to keep this thing, warts and all, since my old router bit the dust and I really don't have the energy to be experimenting with one router after the next, only to keep returning them (I think I'm already on a few lists for being a frequent returner).

I've decided to hardwire the PS3 and the Wii. Hopefully that will cut down on some radio chatter and improve things for the remaining devices. At the very least, my PS3 should stop disconnecting at the most inopportune times.

 

[thiggins]

Have you set the 2.4 GHz radio to Wireless-G only?
Also set the 5 GHz radio to 20 MHz bandwidth, not Auto.

 

[RogueSpear]

Yes, I no longer have any 802.11b-only products and in an act of desperation I also decided to disable n from my 2Ghz range (since only the laptops support it). I also set both radios to 20Mhz bandwidth. I've pretty much fiddled around with all of the settings seeing what might give me the sweet spot I'm looking for and in the end have opted to go pretty conservative with the settings.

I suppose what I may need to do is completely disable the 5Ghz band for a couple days to see if that makes any improvements - even though it sort of defeats half the purpose of this thing. Lastly, I've also done a bit of experimentation with the settings on the laptops, again going conservative, but nothing seems to help noticeably.

 

[thiggins]

You don't want to run a mix of draft 11n and 11g clients on the same radio. The throughput for both will suffer.

Try using only 11g devices on the 2.4GHz radio and connect your 11n notebooks to the 5GHz radio.

Also use WPA2 on any radio that is running 11n. Using WEP or WPA/TKIP will knock down your throughput by 50%.

 

[RogueSpear]

You don't want to run a mix of draft 11n and 11g clients on the same radio. The throughput for both will suffer.

Right, I have disabled n from my 2.4Ghz radio.

Try using only 11g devices on the 2.4GHz radio and connect your 11n notebooks to the 5GHz radio.

At one point I did disable 2.4Ghz from both of the laptops, giving exclusive use to the iPhones, Wii, and PS3. Unfortunately that limits my range to about 3 rooms in the house for the laptops. And it didn't seem to alleviate the problems with the other devices anyway.

What this is boiling down to at this point is that I've bought a dual band n-capable router that will be running single band with n disabled. If it were not for the fact that I really want the gigabit ports to connect my PS3 and Netgear ReadyNAS, I'd probably just return this for a second time and seek out a $49 special. Actually there is one other feature I've grown to like on this - DHCP reservations.

Also use WPA2 on any radio that is running 11n. Using WEP or WPA/TKIP will knock down your throughput by 50%.

Yep, been using WPA2-PSK TKIP right from the beginning.

 

[thiggins]

I have seen other reports (I think referenced in this thread) about problems with simultaneous dual-band operation.

My tests (albeit short) showed no problem with both bands running full-throughput.

If you're basically running an 11g router, return the 610N, get a WRT54G (which also supports DHCP reservations, as do all Linksys routers) and a cheap 5 port gigabit switch. You'll still come out probably at least $50 ahead.

 

[vnangia]

If you're basically running an 11g router, return the 610N, get a WRT54G (which also supports DHCP reservations, as do all Linksys routers) and a cheap 5 port gigabit switch. You'll still come out probably at least $50 ahead.

Slightly offtopic, but I wanted to ask - where does Linksys support address reservation on the WRT54G? I'm looking at my control panel right now and am not finding it and I have been told repeatedly by Linksys support that the only thing I can do if I want the same IP every time is to assign a static IP. Would be much obliged. Running fw v1.02.5 on a HW ver 6 WRT54G. Or did you mean the WRT54G2 has this feature?

 

[thiggins]

Slightly offtopic, but I wanted to ask - where does Linksys support address reservation on the WRT54G?

I'm sorry. I'm wrong. I used to use a WRT54G, but have changed to a D-Link DGL-4300 that has DHCP reservations and was thinking of that.

 

[vnangia]

I'm sorry. I'm wrong. I used to use a WRT54G, but have changed to a D-Link DGL-4300 that has DHCP reservations and was thinking of that.

It's the feature I miss most from my college-era Netgear WGR614; that router is with the folks now.

 

[rogerbinns]

Linksys WRT-610N

I tried the Linksys WRT-610N this evening and found problems with it too. [Ed. See this thread.] The 5GHz band is unreliable when transferring bulk data (eg camcorder files) - it goes nice and fast for about 5-15 seconds and then dies for about 60 (confirmed with perfmon, wireshark and plain old pings). Amazon reviews mention this as well. Used both a Linksys WGA600N client as well as Intel 4965 based laptop.

For a laugh I tried their chat support. Turns out their support doesn't have access to the devices or emulators for them so they don't know what the actual menu options you see are! So they started the usual try all the settings approach which didn't work. For example the band can be auto, wide or standard. And of course no client could associate after changing that until I power cycled the device.

Needless to say I am returning the WRT-610N since the dual band is pointless and the WGA600N since it is pointless paying for that dual band as I reverted to my old single band G access point.

Does anyone in this industry make a device that actually does all that they claim it does for a non-trivial period of time?

 

[Frank]

Generally in forums we read bad experience with a product. Do you think in this case all WRT610N have a problem (manufacturing flaw) or like usual we mostly read those who have problems and report it in forums (very few case in forums we read positive comments on a product).

 

[thiggins]

I have not seen that many reports of 610N problems, relatively speaking, and had no problem with simultaneous wireless operation during my testing.

I have checked with Linksys. Other than a post or two in their forums, they have not been receiving reports of problems with simultaneous dual band operation.

 

[rogerbinns]

I have checked with Linksys. Other than a post or two in their forums, they have not been receiving reports of problems with simultaneous dual band operation.

I don't think it is a manufacturing flaw in the sense of forgetting to connect a wire - the product does fundamentally work. I did some more experimentation before returning the box. If I changed the crypto to be AES rather than auto (even though I thought WPA2 only does AES) then the dropouts weren't long enough for connections to drop and have to re-associate. And I never experienced trouble when doing web browsing etc (ie the wireless was fine at a few hundred kilobytes/s but flaked at 80 mbits/s).

It is most likely variations on "large periodic throughput dropouts" Tim found in the review. With some it gets bad enough that the endpoints disassociate. It seems to depend on exactly which settings you have (WPA vs WPA2, TKIP, AES etc), and no doubt also what the client end picks. I have no idea how much of the issue would be in the chips themselves vs the firmware.

But taking a step back, how many people would actually be able to discover and report these kinds of issues. It requires detailed knowledge of what the various settings mean and what the results should be. It then also involves doing the actions that result in problems as opposed to standard web browsing or even video viewing (high bandwidth DVD would be at a max of 3% of theoretical wireless-N speeds).

Trying to turn this into a positive, Linksys provide no real way of helping with the issue. The outsourced support deals with the initial problems people have rather than this level of detail. As a user you have no way of detailing the problem beyond a written description. What would be really cool is diagnostic firmware or a diagnostic mode in the current firmware where it keeps detailed logs of what is going on. Then I could report problems with the diagnostic log and they could work out if it is my imagination or a real problem and have a good idea what the real problem is. With some other routers users reported frequent reboots. Since they don't have phone capability Linksys have no way of knowing how often that happens. I'm pretty sure they also have no idea what the actual cause was for returns at stores.

I would be very happy to help improve the quality of the products, if only they would provide a way of doing so beyond posting "buyer beware" notes in various online sites.