Rating would be 4.3 stars for the product itself however the company seems to have dishonest support practices which I feel should be publicized.
I have owned this router for about 8 months. Overall it's been very reliable with barely any drop in internet connection which had plagued the much older Belkin router it replaced. Admin module is also nice and easy to use.
Now a few months ago the URL to access the internet based admin module [...] stopped working, both my IE and Chrome browsers would not find the page (a "Can't reach this page" error would pop up on IE). In calling support today I was told this issue would take 20 min to sort but it could be done quicker if I opted for the $20 or so remote support option which is valid for a year. The support associate was courteous but was clearly following a sales script saying that most customers opted for it and being fairly insistent when I declined to pay for this. The kicker is that once we got to it, it actually took less than a minute to fix the problem by simply typing an IP address in the browser instead of the conventional URL, rather than the 20 min first advertised! I expressed that this appeared to be a dishonest practice to the associate and the manager she forwarded me to. If I was paranoid, I may even think that the admin URL was actually somehow programmed to fail so as to direct users to call customer support so as to attempt to have them pay $20 for a service they may not need at all.
This appears to be a very disappointing business practice from what appears to be otherwise a US company that makes really good products. So I recommend the device but beware of this potential for pay support scam, in particular if your admin URL stops working.
6/30/2016 UPDATE:
After contacting Linksys corporate following the bad customer experience described in my initial review, the company managed to pull-off an outstanding recovery and gain my full loyalty as a customer. The company went out of their way and provided their best resources to identify the root cause of the technical issues (turned out to be malware) and not only address it but also help me shore up my PC's protection. More to the concern I had raised in the review, Linksys corporate spent time to understand the issue I encountered with customer care in depth and gave me credible assurances that it ran counter to their policy and that feedback would be provided to the customer care center to avoid future occurrences. I cannot speak for other customers experiences, but in my case I have found Linksys' corporate recovery in this instance to showcase a very high quality organization. In light of this and our very good experience with the product (range was an initial concern but realistically a repeater might be needed given the length of my home), I am upgrading my rating from 2 to 5 stars and would certainly recommend buying Linksys.
| RAM | 512 MB |
|---|---|
| Wireless Type | 802.11a/b/g/n/ac |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
