Tried this on two computers, using it with the companion WRT300N router, and it glitches badly on both. Speed is an improvement over Wireless-G, but not much; and the stability is much worse. Other wireless traffic or a microwave oven turned on throws it into instability and it has to be reset. Also, about every 30-60 seconds, it grabs the CPU for a couple seconds, causing harsh noise from audio and a second or two total halt of any game being played. In Windows XP it shows 270 Mbps speed, but benchmarked actual throughput is less, little better than Wireless-G. Windows Vista does not recognize the -N protocol, and works only as a very slow -G. Tech support is offshore. Nice, polite people who don't know anything that doesn't pop up in their prompts - and more important, who don't have recourse to someone who can answer the tough questions. In the past I've experienced excellent performance from Linksys products, but it's like a different company now, a company to be avoided.
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Avoid LINKSYS WUSB300N Wireless-N
- Thread starter xbeemer
- Start date
#1 It's still the 2.4Ghz frequency band that .b and .g are based on. 2.4 Ghz cordless phones and Microwaves have ALWAYS played hell with them. Try changing the channels.
#2 Linksys have ALWAYS had shitty offshore tech support (Have you ever tried to RMA a Linksys product?). But then again so does D-Link, Netgear, and most of the other Home product oriented brands.
#3 Let's trouble shoot this before you go condemning an entire brand/product line for the failure of one piece. That's not to say that Linksys could use a little bit better product reliability, but...
XP, what version? 32/64bit? PC Specs? What Driver revision? Is there an older rev that's posted and available?
#2 Linksys have ALWAYS had shitty offshore tech support (Have you ever tried to RMA a Linksys product?). But then again so does D-Link, Netgear, and most of the other Home product oriented brands.
#3 Let's trouble shoot this before you go condemning an entire brand/product line for the failure of one piece. That's not to say that Linksys could use a little bit better product reliability, but...
XP, what version? 32/64bit? PC Specs? What Driver revision? Is there an older rev that's posted and available?
PopeKevinI
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I'm avoiding all things N until Draft 2 products are common 
YeOldeStonecat
[H]F Junkie
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Been using Pre-N and Draft-N APs and routers for a while...I love them mixed with G NICs such as Centrino chipsets...fantastic performance. The SRX400 and the wrt300n routers have been working great for clients. I'm staying away from N NICs though..pretty much stay with the Centrino ones in IBM/Lenovo laptops.
Their support for VARs is great.
Their support for VARs is great.
Heh. Do you think that after all the trouble I described, I hadn't done the obvious things like change channels, and download the latest drivers and the latest firmware? Duh. No need to be patronizing.
Yes, microwave and wireless phones are going to degrade signal. But with Wireless-N there should be enough extra signal to not crash and have to be reset as a minimum, and I had hoped it would actually allow continued connection when the microwave is on. In fact the D-Link Dir655/DWA556 that replace the Lynksys setup has done all that and more. It went in easy, works with XP and Vista (had to go fish for the Vista drivers, tho), and it barely slows down when the microwave oven is nuking someone's coffee.
Offshore support is less an issue than quality of support. I'm happy to take good support from the moon, if it does the job. The problem I ran into with Linksys support - and I tried chat (twice), phone, and email - is that it is only capable of the most superficial of support, essentially repeating what is already in the manual or on the web site. This is typical, but what is not typical is that there seems to be no where for the support person to go. I got several "just a minute, let me check with my supervisor" pauses, then the answer that came back was equally mindless. It is a support system designed to put people off, not to help them. I am a software developer and I use tech support all the time for complicated issues - never, ever have I found support as bad as this. Even Microsoft at least has an extensive online database so if you are persistant enough you can query your way into information you need on most issues. With Linksys, I found I was left hanging out to dry, with no futher recourse.
By contrast I called D-Link technical support to ask a question about the PCI-Express config, got a (how do you say this?) not-offshore tech person who actually knew what he was talking about, and gave a useful and (it turned out) correct answer right away.
So, problem solved. Wireless N is good if you have a good setup, and the D-Link Dir655/DWA556 combination turns out to be terrific.
You know the funny thing is that Linksys is part of Cisco but Cisco hasn't released anything with N technology (w/ Cisco logo) yet because it's not a standard yet. But they push out Pre-N with the Linksys logo. So that tells me don't buy anything with N yet.