Linksys Open Source WiFi Wireless-G Broadband Router, Speeds up to (AC1200) 1.2Gbps - WRT54GL

This router is nothing short of amazing! I needed to upgrade our house system from an older Ethernet router to a router that would offer both hardwired Ethernet ports (for the legacy Ethernet devices in our house, including my desktop PC) and also WiFi, but the catch was that I was hoping to get WiFi range up to over 100 feet in radius, and I knew in advance that this range is often not achieved in under-$100 WiFi routers.However, after a bit of online research into WiFi routers, my gut sense told me to pick this router, which was priced under $50. It arrived a few days ago, and I set it up almost immediately. The setup on my Windows 7 desktop PC was quite straightforward, but I do note that the Setup Wizard ground to a halt and failed after the installation of the all-important drivers, and I was not even able to close the program and its window until I used Task Manager to unload the application. I then tested the router, and it worked fine, even though the Setup Wizard had not yet completed. I note that several other reviewers of this product have also noted that the Setup Wizard had also failed/frozen up on them while they were installing the router.I then tested the router performance a bit, and even though I used rather lengthy (12 foot long) cheaper older Ethernet cables to connect the router to the cable modem (we have very fast Comcast cable modem service, and a very fast Motorola cable modem) and to connect the router to my PC, I noticed immediately that the speed/bandwidth, via Ethernet cable, and also via WiFi, was obviously considerably faster than had been the case my older router, which had always offered very adequate speed/bandwidth.I then tested the WiFi range indoors. Our house is an older wooden house which has a footprint of only about 1600 square feet (including an enclosed porch), and, while walking around with my laptop, I noticed that WiFi coverage was great throught both floors of the house, and also on the enclosed porch, and also in the unfinished basement.I then decided to test the WiFi range outdoors, using only my cheap laptop and its admittedly-limited-range built-in factory-equipped WiFi antenna/WiFi module, because we live on a heavily-wooded lot (no lawn, only forested mountainside) I was also hoping that the WiFi signal might possibly reach my workshop, which is located about 125 feet from the modem's 2ndfloor locaiton in the house, and I was also hoping that the WiFi signal might also reach two enclosed meditation gazebos, which are located, respectively, about 130 feet and 160 feet from the house, with numerous intervening large trees, and also bushes, between each of these three structures and the house.To my amazement, the WiFi signal strength in each of these three outdoor structures was very good; this was particularly surprising in the case of my workshop, which has wooden walls and roof that are heavily lined with foil/bubble/foil insulation, and there were also a dozen CFL lamps (which are known to emit RF inferference (aka RFI) which can interfere with WiFi signals) burning brightly the workshop at the time of my test.I then decided to try to push the limits of the modem's WiFi range, and started walking further into the forest beyond each of the three structures that I mentioned above. To my amazment, I discovered that the build-in WiFi antenna/circuitry inside my inexpensive 3-year old laptop was able to receive the WiFi signal (and still at a very impressive speed/bandwidth) out to a distance of at least 390 feet from the house (I did not try to go further, because I was tired of tramping up the mountainside in the snow), despite the fact that there were many dozens of large trees (and also bushes) in the signal path between the house and my varied test locations in the forest.I then ran some additional coverage range tests in other directions (since all of the above-mentioned tests had been confined within the same 90 degree slice of the 360 degree coverage radius), all of them heavily forested, and these further tests confirmed that the signal reached to at least the same distance in every direction as had been found earlier, with the sole exception of one direction, where an intervening steeply-rising hillside/mountainside completely occluded the line-of sight path about 100 feet from the house; this limited the WiFi range in this direction to a bit less than 300 feet from the house.In conclusion, I can say that this WiFi router vastly exceeded all of my expectations! It's performance continues to amaze me today, about 6 days after the router was first installed. And to realize that I paid less than $50 for this router at Amazon Marketplace. . . it is quite amazing!My next step, since I have also noticed that the WiFi signal reaches the henhouse with very good strength, is to install one of my old laptops in the henhouse so that our chickens and ducks can surf the web whenever they wish.

This is typical of all the Cisco-Linksys products I've owned; I have never gotten a bad one (knock on wood). For the money you can't do any better I think. The range is as good as I want it to be since I don't want to attract war drivers. I actually only use this for our android cell phones which it handles fine; the rest of my network is wired and the mixed network plays well with this device. If you have a dhcp server on your network, you will want to disable that functionality on the WRT54GL or at least set up non-conflicting address pools. Personally I need a little more control over dhcp leases than you can configure with this device.I had to set it up twice. I turned on MAC address filtering and very carefully added all my devices; when I saved the settings I couldn't connect from anything so I had to restore factory defaults and start over. I'm not sure what happened, but I know I didn't type all the MAC addresses in wrong. Maybe there is a timeout on connections and I took too long entering the MAC addresses; I did get an error and had to resubmit my changes. I'll figure that part out later.I'm a little concerned about the setup program; frankly it's pretty lame. All illustrations and instructions assume the absolute barest network possible, i.e. 1 dsl router plugged into 1 pc with a single NIC, so the entire scenario is designed to have you plug the dsl modem straight into the internet port on the WRT54GL router and use the supplied cable to plug your pc into one of the four 10/100 ports on the back of the router. Maybe it's the people I hang out with, but I haven't seen very many home "networks" that simplistic in a long time. I plugged the WRT54GL internet port into the switchable port 1 on my aging Netgear switch and plugged the dsl modem into another auto sensing port and the WRT54GL didn't know the difference. My wireless network still works and the androids have an on site wifi which was my goal.Incidentally, the only setup program provided is the Windows setup.exe. Whose in charge of this project?After you run the setup program you can connect to the router using the embedded browser based admin tool. I blinked a couple of times when I saw that the minimal browser based admin program is coded in ASPX which seems strange. I haven't been out of the business long enough to forget the immense cost of using Microsoft technology; they may forget about the known bugs in their solutions at deploy time, but they never forget to license and charge. Oh well, at least it works and this is not exactly a backbone router. Incidentally, the public, non-routable ip address of device is 192.168.1.1 so if you are using that address on something on your network you will need to resolve the conflict.Our cell phones hooked right up and WIFI calling was enabled in minutes, which was the goal. Recommended.