Cisco-Linksys Refurbished E3000 High-Performance Wireless-N Router - E3000-RM / E3000RM (REFURBISHED BY LINKSYS / CISCO WITH A 90 DAY WARRANTY)

 (63 customer reviews)

Just bought a refurbished E3000 wireless router. It was pretty impressive - easy to use, easy to configure, and seemed to have great range. Ten minutes later, however, it was giving me the blinking power LED - meaning it was having a major problem.

I spent the next two hours with Cisco Support in India trying to convince them that it didn't matter if I was using AT&T or Verizon for my ISP - their own web site indicated a flashing power LED meant a defective router. They eventually agreed to replace it - a process that will take a couple of weeks.

Usually, when a company has a large enough inventory of refurbished devices to sell them retail, there's a fundamental problem with the hardware. I suggest staying away from the refurbished version - and perhaps even the new product.

My issues with this router stem not so much from the quality of the router itself (it's actually very good when it's working properly), but rather with how little effort Cisco/Linksys put into "refurbishing" their products. From my experience, Cisco's/Linksys' quality assurance standards are so astoundingly low that they have no qualms about sending you a bricked router as was what happened in my case (more on this after my review).

For the time being, I will disregard my gripes with the company and focus solely on the router. Once the E3000 is actually set up, it is a very nice, very easy to use device as anyone who has bought one of Linksys/Cisco's other routers can confirm. For the week or so that I have owned this router (after getting it to work), I've not encountered any issues with connecting wireless devices to it nor have I had any connectivity issues (dropped/slow/weak connections).

Now onto my issues with Cisco/Linksys and why you should be careful...Read more

This router does not allow "Channel Bonding" at 2.4GHz only at 5GHz. Therefore, 300Mbps speed CAN NOT be achieved at 2.4GHz. "Customer Support" rerouts you to a "pay for answer site"; answer from here is worthless as well.