Cisco-Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge

 (159 customer reviews)

If you are considering this bridge to do video/audio streaming inside your house, think again. This review is based on over 2 months worth of testing this unit and then working with Linksys/Cisco trying to figure why it does not deliver. A saleperson at a local store may have told you that you can stream MP3s over your wireless network, or perhaps you have two DVRs in your house and your want to stream recorded TV shows from one to another. This is not the device you want to use for this purpose. Don't belive me? Ask Linksys level 3 support. Its architecture is not designed to support high levels of network traffic needed for streaming -- it has very small or zero I/O buffers to handle it -- as a result, the device will crash after 2-5 minutes of streaming. You can power cycle it and it will resume for the next 2-5 min. But forget streaming for a moment, WET54G crashed when I was simply working from home VPN'd into my company. Not for that either?! Do you think that WET54G ver...Read more

I purchased a total of 4 of these units to replace a fleet of aging WET11 bridges (which I may add performed flawlessly in their years of service) at both my home and business. Immediately after setting them up I began to notice problems which required frequent rebooting of the bridges. After less than 24 hours, one of the units went completely dead and unresponsive, and since then one other has bitten the dust as well. I have wasted countless hours with Linksys support online, and was told that I should run WEP encryption on my network to help solve the problem, even though the main reason I bought the WET54G is because it supports WPA. Needless to say I returned all of the bridges for a refund. To make matters worse, now my old WET11 bridges are now also acting strangly (I'm guessing due to my WRT54G router's firmware upgrade that was suggested by the fine folks at Linksys).

I have long been a fan of Linksys even though most other people seem to put them down...Read more

I bought this unit to replace my Linksys WET11. I was using the WET11 for my ReplayTV, but was converting all of my wireless network over to Wireless-G Only. Just so you know, I never use the CD that comes with these things. I just plug it in and view my router admin page to see what IP it gets (provided you are using DHCP). Then open a browser and type in the IP assigned to it. I have found this to be the easiest and quickest way to configure these. It takes about 30 seconds total. I am very happy with the WET54G - it works great with my ReplayTV, so if you have a ReplavyTV or a TIVO it should work fine.