Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsThe perfect extender if you want no wireless network in your house.
Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2015
Linksys products have gone down hill over the past few years but since I already had a linksys wireless router I decided to buy this range extender to expand my wireless network to reach areas of my house where the signal was really weak. After receiving the extender I did a site survey on my house to see where a good location to put the extender would be.
The device is extremely easy to setup so if you are a novice when dealing with networking equipment. The wizard, which you are forced to use, quickly finds your 2.4 and 5GHz networks. Once you have logged into each network the extender auto configures and you now can add the new SSID's to the extender and you should be able to connect to the Extender. Key word here is should. I was unable to ever connect to the device and was always forced to get on my primary wireless router. After calling into tech support, which is a horrible experience. You could tell the tech was reading from a script and didn't really try to help resolve my issues. After 1.5 hours of dealing with support it was determined that the product that I purchased was defective and that they would send me a new one. Ok, i thought that there was potential for the product at this point and I waited for my RMA'ed device. After 2 WEEKS, I finally got a new extender from linksys, which by the way, I had to pay to ship them the broken device.
Take 2. I put the extender in place and configure it to join my existing network. This time I'm able to connect to the extender which was farther than I got the first time. After about 15 minutes of being connected to the extender my connection kept dropping. I would lose my network and it would then go to the primary wireless. To solve this manually deleted my primary network to stay on the extender. Again after 15 minutes the computer would drop off and not reconnect. I started to test other devices, iphones, ipads, OSX laptops, Windows 7 laptops and a linux server. All the same, no device stayed connected. Once again I called up Linksys to talk with their uber technical staff. After 20 minutes of answering the same questions that i answered the first time I called in I was told that my complimentary support was about to run out and I was asked if I wanted to buy an extended support plan to proceed. At this point I started to get a little upset considering I had already returned one product and had to wait almost 3 weeks to get the new one and now the new one doesn't work and they want me to pay for extended warranty.
Needless to say I didn't pay for it but demanded someone to support the issue that I was seeing considering the fact that the product was an RMA and at this point only a week old in my eyes.
After 2 hours on the phone with support it was determined that the device was operating as it was suppose to and that I needed to move it closer to my primary device. So for haha's I moved it closer, I put it in the same room as my primary router and the issues persisted. The support person asked me how far away the device was from my primary router and and I told him about 5 feet and he immediately ran out of things to ask me. I couldn't deal with their support people any more and after wasting 3 hours with them I decided to hang up the phone.
After about a week of tinkering with the configuration of the extender I managed to get the devices to connect to it and stay. I had to allow the extender to DHCP to my primary network. The second you set a static IP on the extender nothing seems to work.
Now that I actually had devices connected to the extender it was time to test out the range. What a disappointment that was. The areas of my house that didn't get the signal from the primary router still weren't getting the signal from the extender. Next big issue, the overall throughput of my wireless network drastically reduced. The seconded I powered on the extender and did any type of bandwidth tests regardless of being connected to the primary router or the extender my overall wireless network's throughput was cut in half and in some cases worse than that.
Needless to say I have turned the extender off permanently.I tired to return it but since it had already been RMA'ed and I had past the time to return it to amazon it is now a paper weight on my desk. I even went a step further and shut off my primary wireless router which was a linksys EA4500 and bought a Netgear Nighthawk X6. Since having that my entire house has coverage, internet bandwidth is good everywhere, wireless network throughput for streaming movies and file sharing in the house are blazing fast and I only have 1 device to manage instead of 2.
If you really need better coverage in your house don't get this extender, pony up the extra $$ and buy a tri-band router that has a wide coverage range.
