This past weekend has been a frustrating one at best. Saturday it seemed that my old Linksys WRT54G router finally died, or so it seemed. So, we went out and purchased a new router. I've always had Linksys routers so that's the brand I purchased. The new router is/was a Linksys WRT110 and from my experience this weekend is good for nothing other than a frisbee.

My first experience was I couldn't get any of our wireless connections to actually connect. It seems you have to disable IEEE authentication on the connections. OK, fine I did that after a long call with Linksys tech support and everyone was happy. But the router was acting kind-of funny. It took a very long time to load the web pages it serves up for the configuration of the router. I thought no biggie, must just be something with my pc.

Since I now work from home the next task was to ensure that I could actually work. Surprise, surprise Lotus Notes was reporting that my employers servers were down, and so were the Prominic servers. Doubtful as my website was up and functioning. So, after another long call with Linksys tech support I got that to working, or so I thought. I had to enter the required ports in the port triggering section of the routers configuration. After fighting with unusually long wait times waiting on the router to load, save and refresh each page it seems to have worked. But I was still experiencing problems with the routers configuration web pages.

OK, so my workstations can now connect wirelessly, Lotus Notes is working as it should along with the stuff my wife requires to work from home. Now, I host a website for work related documentation so I needed to setup the port forwarding part for that. Well, it doesn't work. I also had to add port 80 to the port triggering section along with the port forwarding for port 80. I never did get this to work properly, also, now Lotus Notes and various other apps weren't working properly, at least this time. The next time I tried them they worked fine, just nothing consistent.

So, out of frustration I tried reinstalling my old router, well it seems that it's now working fine and everything else is now functioning as it should. Tomorrow morning I will be returning the WRT110 for a refund and I must say I am very disappointed with the route that Linksys is starting to take. I've been setting up networks and recommending Linksys products for years. I have a couple of how-tos on this website on setting up your home based website using a linksys router, so I'm very familiar with the Linksys product. But how is someone that doesn't really know anything about setting up a home network supposed to use this product? After all my frustration, I'm thinking I may need to re-think my loyalties to Linksys, which regardless to say is regrettable. But how can I recommend something to a customer that I don't believe in or have confidence in? Linksys, you need to get it together and change the route you're taking, especially if you are to keep me as a customer.

On a positive note, the support I received from Linksys was top notch. The people I talked to, while I suspect were in India or some other country, did provide good courteous service and I didn't have a long wait to talk to someone. I'm just not happy with the product and it will be returned tomorrow.