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Cisco Small Business RV042 Wired Routers
Customer Reviews for Cisco Small Business RV042 Dual WAN VPN Router - Retail
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Price: $179.99
Sale Price: $159.57
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Review Summary (97 Reviews): Rating + 4
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Excellent Rating + 5 45ReviewsExcellent
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newegg
19%
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newegg
6%
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newegg
15%
Very Poor Rating + 1 13ReviewsVery Poor
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Reviewer Product Review
N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
1/30/2010 8:04:55 PM

Rating + 5 We have a winner


Pros: Reliable, Fast, relatively easy to setup.

Cons: No gigabit

Other Thoughts: I've got two of these routers in service currently. One at a clients home who only has the option for low bandwidth DSL (1.5mb) so he brought in two lines and I configured the router for load balencing. It's been working great for about 2 years now. No longer does his internet slow to the point of being unresponsive when his off-site backups are running.

The second is in my home, it replaced a Linksys RVS4000. The 4000 was a good router but was limited to about 16mbps with IPS enabled and around 25mbps disabled. Not bad, but i'm paying for a 30mb pipe and the RV042 delivers! I'm getting ALL my bandwidth and the web interface remains responsive and fast, versus the 4000 which would lag if the router was under load. Configuration changes are applied almost instantly where as the 4000 would take a full two minutes to reboot for certain changes.

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H
Tech Level: high
Ownership: less than 1 day
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/26/2010 10:02:15 PM

Rating + 4 Maybe


Pros: Too many to name them all but if you have a network connection of 10megs down speed or less and plan to use two modems this is the router for you.

Cons: Wan port will not go pass 12 megs each. Two modems and only about 24 meg down while each of the modem can do 50 megs down. My current router a simple WRT54GS can hit 45 to 50 megs every time so I was disappointed that this business router would not.

Other Thoughts: I will be looking to get another one maybe one with gigabyte wan ports.

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/26/2010 4:28:25 AM

Rating + 4 Slow but solid


Pros: Once configured unit is solid and stable even under a heavy load.

Cons: Lost about 40% of burst bandwidth - not noticeable under heavy load.

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WaldenL
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
1/20/2010 6:15:41 AM

Rating + 4 Great Router -- but no TFTP passthrough


Pros: A wonderful dual-wan router. I've had it as my primary router for a couple of years now. Supports (almost) everything you could want in a router. Highly recommended.

Cons: Doesn't support (correctly) TFTP. Note, I said TFTP, this is not the normal FTP. Normal FTP is just fine. But if you want to boot voip phones from a remote host TFTP is needed, and this router doesn't support it. If you don't have that need, I highly recommend this router.

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Alex
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/19/2010 9:41:55 AM

Rating + 5 Great Router


Pros: - Fantastic Interface
- Easy Setup
- Many Router Options

Cons: None So Far

Other Thoughts: This thing sports the text book linksys web interface just expanded with all types of new options. Setting up Dual-WAN could never have been easier and it seems to load balance with the best of them.

Also supports DMZ and some other fairly advanced routing features for a cheaper price.

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marky mark
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/18/2010 9:07:55 AM

Rating + 5 a solid buy


Pros: Great router. I use it in a business environment. It is reliable and works great. I have two offices separated by about 100miles, and one of these routers on each end. Makes an awesome stable VPN connection.

Cons: one of these died for no reason after about 3 years.

Other Thoughts: Decided to stay with these routers because of their awesome track record, and ability to add a second WAN connection.

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/11/2010 11:06:47 AM

Rating + 4 Pretty Nice


Pros: Snappy interface, compared to many other linksys products, So far its been really reliable, I have a 10Mbit line and a 3Mbit line combined to give me 13Mbit when using in load balanced mode.

Cons: Its a little on the warm side, and sometimes the port/traffic based affinity doesn't work immediately, you'd have to save it a few times, or reoganize the lists of IP's or services you are binding to certain interfaces.

Also Inbound port forwarding acts funky sometimes. especially for 3389 (RDP). However after a few tweaks setting traffic to always go out one provider seems to have solved the problem.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
12/17/2009 3:10:12 PM

Rating + 5 Great VPN box


Pros: Excellent remote office VPN/Firewall box.

Cons: It doesnt cook me breakfast

Other Thoughts: I have 3 of these in service with no problems. They connect to a sonicwall fire wall at the main office. Throughput is excellent I recommend them frequently.

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Getting Cranky Geeki
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
12/12/2009 10:03:00 AM

Rating + 5 What?!? This is a great router


Pros: Price/Performance

This is a GREAT SOHO solution. Connecting two of these (or an RV016) creates a ROCK SOLID VPN tunnel. It's got VLAN capabilities, QOS, what the heck do you want for less than $200 bucks???

Cons: The Linksys QuickVPN client is junk. That's true. But this has a great PPTP server in it so - again what the heck do you expect for less than $200?

Other Thoughts: Love it

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Craig
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
11/26/2009 8:11:38 AM

Rating + 1 Obsolete, Old Design, Time for Cisco to Redesign this Badboy


Pros: One of the first affordable VPN dual WAN failsafe routers with load balancing capabilities. NO PRO's, if only the original hype was true; NOT. Now this unit is very long in the tooth (OLD) and should be retired or redesigned.

Cons: Great idea, poor implementation. VPN client was non-functional and even Linksys could not get it working; ultimately we used a software based VPN network as a workaround. The dual WAN load balanced in a haphazard round robin way causing significant problems when accessing secure websites as they kept logging out of the secure sessions when the router would switch between the WANs in mid session. We gave up and used the second WAN for failsafe operations only; but it took several minutes for the unit to switch over during outages and we finally dropped the second WAN. Furthermore the WANs lost up to 70% of their rated speed and the unit ran REALLY HOT. Poor Support: the first burned up after a few months and the replacement died a year later; Linksys accepted it back on a Warranty RMA but never returned it despite proof of delivery. Still waiting!

Other Thoughts: Originally purchased because Hurricane Charley wrecked the local ISP infrastructure. Bought it for its reported dual wan failsafe and load balancing capabilities which never worked as promised. Do NOT use this router if you have a mission critical requirement.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

John Denver
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
11/23/2009 7:58:47 AM

Rating + 1 Good Idea - bad product


Pros: Very good idea. The RV042 has a failback ISP connection. Both connections have DDNS service and in theory this is a good thing. VPN can be used either as software client or hardware - use another RV042 on the other end.

Cons: All of the above would be great if this product would work as advertised. First, the VPN client that comes with the router is a joke. Even the tech support is sugessting not to use it, and use windows VPN features instead. Second, if one of the ISP connections fails, the other one would take significantly long time to come back on line - several minutes. Third: and in my opinion the most significant - the speed is downgraded to almost 40-45% of the original provided by ISP. For example, if you have an ISP that provides 10 MBps, the most you will get through this router would be 5 + some overhead.

Other Thoughts: Customer support: this device is so complicated that even customer support can't get you a straight answer. In most of the cases I have been refered to tier 2 or higher, and that is only by e-mail. This can take days to solve simple issue, and in some cases the language barrier is adding more issues to the original problem.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

Scott
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
11/19/2009 5:58:41 PM

Rating + 5 I have 4 of these now


Pros: Great router, easy to set up, solid VPN

For the money, you can't beat it.

Don't have to be certified or be a network tech to figure out how to configure it.

I Intend to get the same router when the ones i have go out.

Cons: I heard that they don't handle heat well, but haven't had one fail yet. I put a fan on 2 of them.

I spent some time trying to get QuickVPN to work and had no luck. My VPNs are configured router to router.

Other Thoughts: I have one setup with a VPN and IP phone synching into our main office, it's worked link a charm (2 years). The one at our main office, we've had for almost 4 years, works great (but i do have an external fan on it, just in case). I have one at my home with a VPN synched to the main office. Accessing files from either location works perfectly. At home i have a dynamic IP and the DynDNS.org service works great, the VPN never goes down.

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bob
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
11/8/2009 11:56:45 PM

Rating + 1 Dont ever buy Linksys


Pros: hmm, nothing. maybe that they've outsourced all their tech support. NOT

Cons: I've never had more problems with a router than I've had with linksys. PPTP doesn't work. throughput is terrible. get something different.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

ghowey
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
10/21/2009 2:10:20 PM

Rating + 1 Poor Hardware


Pros: None. After working with two of these routers for over a year and waiting for Linksys/Cisco to update firmware twice, I was finally able to achieve gateway to gateway ipsec vpn, dynamic to static ip's. After two months of service one unit refuses to pass any packets. Linksys/Cisco will not replace defective unit, out of warranty period. Very disappointed with Linksys/Cisco.

Cons: See Above.

Other Thoughts: OpenVPN is the only way to go. Now I do not have to worry with expensive unreliable ipsec capable routers.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

Palindrome
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
10/10/2009 11:41:30 AM

Rating + 5 Perfect for county bumpkins


Pros: Cheap. Combines my two broadband connections together - neither is very broad because I live in the country at the end of the road where the DSL is kinda flaky and the wireless broadband is kinda slow. This unit gives me the best of both put together.

Cons: HTTPS sites will be problematic. However, this can be solved by routing all HTTPS traffic through one connection or the other. Doing so is fairly simple from the web admin panel.

Other Thoughts: Totally worth the money.

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Allixo
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
9/30/2009 4:31:55 PM

Rating + 5 Great Firewall


Pros: Best all around firewall device for the money. Offers great VPN connectivity that is very reliable + easy to set up. Our company has deployed at least 12 of these without any issue.

Cons: PCI compliance issues in older firmware. Other than that, none!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
8/23/2009 2:07:46 PM

Rating + 1 Do not purchase


Pros: It looks nice. It is packaged well. Newegg got it to me very quickly, as usual.

Cons: I work in IT. I work with routers ranging from under a hundred dollars to thousands of dollars. I can honestly say that this is, unequivocally, the worst router I have ever used. The VPN functionality is worthless. I was unable to set up any sort of VPN functionality, from site-to-site, client-to-site or even (perhaps especially) QuickVPN.

I have a 20megabit internet connection. I couldn't get speeds over 10megs from behind this router. With another router in place, I average about 18megs.

Technical support is friendly, but ultimately altogether unhelpful. I spent over three hours on the phone with technical support, and not one of my issues were resolved. I even allowed them remote access to the router. The tech actually managed to lock himself out. I got him back in, and several times, he would look at or attempt to change settings and say "well that's weird".

For your own sake, do not buy. go buy the cheapest router you can find; I assure you, you will be happier.

5 out of 10 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

BZ
Tech Level: average
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
6/4/2009 1:03:22 PM

Rating + 5 Just Fine


Pros: Not complicated or anything exceptionally special, just a simple and dependable VPN router.

Fairly easy to follow utility and setup.

Cons: None that I've run into

Other Thoughts: I have four of these installed at our projects with no failures after several years.

I have basic LAN and WAN setup and understanding and use this for basic networking and VPN purposes.

Gaming type experience is not part of my background so I am not judging on that level

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

Jayw654
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
4/18/2009 3:52:14 PM

Rating + 5 Best Professional Router For The Dollar


Pros: Works wonderfully. I have not had the slightest issue with it. Except for the El Cheapo power adapter that came with it.

Cons: The supplied adapter that comes with it is completely worthless. It's light and junky but yet it's suppose to supply 12v 1000ma. Yeah, right! This seems to be the source of 95 percent of the complaints of this router. Bad power can cause malfunctions of any electronic devices and since this adapter in an unregulated adapter it will pass along all the spikes and surges to your electronic devices. This shortens the life of the device also. Smart people buy high end power supplies for there computers because it improves performance and life to there computer so why would it be any different for any other electronic device? Buy a quality heavy power adapter for it. Yes the heavy ones that were most common in the 80's. Make sure it's a regulated power adapter.

Other Thoughts: Used the supplied adapter and died in a week. I replaced the adapter and i had no problems with the device working. This also stopped all my glitches and malfunctions.

5 out of 7 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
4/14/2009 5:39:13 PM

Rating + 4 Heat = Death


Pros: Hands down best router money can buy for under $200. My first one lasted 5 years and suprassed 180-day uptimes like it was nothing. Withstood heavy traffic the entire time without ever needing to be reset other than for updating firmware or changes to UPS.

Cons: Apparently there is some kind of design flaw with the RV042. Mine stopped working yesterday after 5 years of trouble free operation. TFTP recovery worked after unit allowed to cool for several hours. After it warmed back up to a certain point, it crashed. Luckily I was able to copy all the settings out of it!

Other Thoughts: I didn't hesitate to buy another today. The only concern I have with this unit is the fact that Cisco doesn't seem to be interested in fixing the RV042. All it seems to need are some copper heat sinks on certain chips and possibly a small low-RPM fan. Maybe this is a simple DIY job that can make these things last for 10+ years...

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

Lee
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
4/9/2009 11:05:17 AM

Rating + 5 Solid entry level VPN router


Pros: Dual WAN, secondary WAN port can be used as a DMZ if you wish, easy VPN setup for device to device or device to client VPNs too. Has built-in firewall with firewall config wizard for creating rules if you aren't familar with creating them yourself. It has a decent built-in help system as well. Overall, this is a good little device for a home office or small office (remote office situation). It does load balancing between the two WAN ports as well.

Cons: When using the device in load balance mode, you can run into issues with web sites that require logins, and secure sites. This is caused by some traffic being sent out both WAN ports. It would be nice if the device would track sessions and send all session data for a particular site out the same WAN port so that type of thing doesn't happen.

I attempted to use the secondary WAN port for our VPN line, and make that port the 'smart link backup' or failover line, and when placing the device in this configuration the tunnel would come down.

Beyond this issue, I can find no real fault with the device. It does seem to run warm, so don't place anything directly on top of it so it can radiate it's heat.

Other Thoughts: Our company runs two of these devices in our remote offices, and an RV082 (8 port, big brother to these guys) in our home office as the main feed for the VPNs and we have no issues with any of them aside from what's listed in the Cons section. I can say that we are happy with them all.

Also, although this site shows 30 tunels in the specifications, the RV042 actually supports 50 tunnels, and the RV082 supports up to 100.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

netposer
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/30/2009 2:19:12 PM

Rating + 5 Works Great


Pros: Easy to setup. Just like a normal home router except it has 2 wan ports instead of one. You can connect 2 cable modems or 2 DSL modems or one of each in 2 different modes. Dual Wan mode which combines both up and down speeds or failover mode.

Cons: Websites that use IP based or hybrid IP based authentication might not work. PHPBB uses the first 3 octets of your IP so if you are in dual wan mode you will be logged out constantly since your ip fluctuates with each http request. So far that's the only site that has given me problems after 3 months of use.

Other Thoughts: I really like combining 2 cable modems for double the speed. And it's super easy to release 1 of the WAN ip's if you run into authentication problems.

5 out of 6 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

N/A
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: less than 1 day
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/22/2009 8:07:50 AM

Rating + 1 Cisco.com Security Problem


Pros: I have purchased this product as recommended by my VoIP company as being a compatible router with their service.

Cons: As soon as I opened the box, I went to Cisco.com to register the product for updates and security related information (the link provided by the documentation to www.linksys.com/registration was wrong). As soon as I registered with Cisco.com, they emailed my password to me in plain text. I expect a company that deals with Internet security products would have better sense than to email passwords in plain text. How can I trust any of Cisco's security measures after that?

Other Thoughts: I haven't even used the product yet. I am going to keep the product because we have been having problems with our VoIP service and this product was recommended to fix it. I don't necessarily recommend a ban on Cisco products by any means, but complain loudly to the company until they understand that this is not OK. Their corporate telephone number is (408)526-4000 and ask for a supervisor.

1 out of 26 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

Ade - Smart Dolphins
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
1/10/2009 8:12:27 AM

Rating + 5 Business Use


Pros: VPN works great
Can setup many tunnels
Low price for lots of features
Can be used in place of some higher end Cisco routers. We use these in travel agencies running VPN tunnels to Galileo with little to no problems.

Cons: Have had issues with over 5 tunnels running at the same time where we had to have client restart unit on a semi regular basis (once per month)

Other Thoughts: This is a great unit has all the features of the 8 and 16 port version, but much lower price. Only need to purchase a switch to gain more ports.

6 out of 6 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

FWT
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/6/2009 8:54:58 AM

Rating + 5 It routes


Pros: Works as it should, easy to configure.

Cons: Did not hang itself on the wall.

Other Thoughts: Bought this as an exact replacement to a device that was damaged in a lightning storm. Configuration was easy and so far I have not had any complaints.

3 out of 4 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

Drstovetop
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg
11/11/2008 12:09:46 PM

Rating + 4 Strap In... This is NOT for Beginners


Pros: VPN... !

This is why i got it. And now finally after a month of playing with it, I finally got it to connect. Oops, probably shouldn't have said that, but its true. This thing is a mess, and to the defense of Cisco, i haven't exactly been trying that hard to get it to work. But its working now, but its not for beginners so be sure you know what you're getting into before purchasing this. Once you get everything working though, you will breathe a big sigh of relief and grin from eat to ear.

Cons: A lot of freaking work to set up and make everything work together.

Other Thoughts: I bought this so that i could set up a very cool home network, 2 Tb NAS, several computers, and VPN so that im never stranded without access. This is a lot of work and setup especially when also setting up a wireless router to go with it and getting access to everything from everywhere not to mention speed issues with Vista.

This is well worth it if you have the patience and i mean PATIENCE. Take your time and give it a chance it will work but it will take a dilignet person to make it all work.

This point of view is from a "Networking for Beginners" point of view, i never played too much with networking just prefered that i could access the internet and was content with that. Making everything play nice with one another is a challenge if youre not a IT professional, even if you're pretty knowledgable at this stuff.

1 out of 4 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

netposer
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg
11/9/2008 5:23:42 AM

Rating + 5 Works Great!


Pros: Easy setup and if you owned a Linksys router before you'll be comfortable with the admin interface. Was very easy to setup both WAN configs. I have 2 cable modems and I can assign DNS to each cable modem. Port forwarding is straight-forward and there's tons of VPN configuration which I have not used yet.

Cons: You have to remember to "save" your changes when configuring and the problem is the "save settings" button is at the bottom of the page even though it "seems" you have made the changes at the top of the page.

Other Thoughts: This router allows 2 WAN connections (Cable or DSL). You can configure it to Load Balance or Fail over. I have it configured for Load Balancing and It pretty much double's my upload and download speeds. I'm on Suddenlink's basic package of 8 down and 512 up.

Since you have 2 IPs (one for each cable modem) you won't get double speeds from one source but it's pretty good at balancing the throughput. I downloaded 2 4GB ISO images from my FTP server and it downloaded one on each IP. So it took less than an hour to download over 8GB.

Have not run into any problems with the 2 IPs. Not even online banking or my work's VPN.

Did you find this review helpful? Yes No

N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
9/8/2008 1:56:42 PM

Rating + 3 starting to see problems


Pros: Decent value, I've bought about a dozen over the past 2 years and saved the company a bundle over somewhat similar functionality from cisco products ... tech support is more available than from some other companies but only occasionally helpful (I'd say 1 out of 3 issues have been resolved or at least adequately addressed).

Cons: Starting to see overheating and crashing problems like others are reporting, these seem to have a 1-2 year lifespan then they just start dying.

Help files are average but in some key points completely inadequate.

Other Thoughts: For a long time the quickvpn client was complete garbage, dropped connections after a certain amount of data was passed, they seem to have fixed this but it took over a year, and tech support was very unhelpful during that time.

Can't compare to other products as we standardized on these and have stuck with them despite some regrets.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

ZooieARC
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
8/26/2008 6:53:56 PM

Rating + 1 TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE!!!


Pros: Nice while they work...then constant crashing.
Very easily configurable and good for small offices where you would require a gigabit uplink.

Cons: I have purchased about 2-dozen may more of these routers and now I through with them!
They keep locking up and over heating and then Linksys tech support can only offer a firmware upgrade that does nothing to prevent the same lock ups and freezing that had been happening all along.
I finally call customer support for 2-RV042’s that will not boot up at all and continue to have the amber DIAG light despite all the resetting and everything else that tech support has you go through.
Upon calling for a replacing (my first call to Linksys) they wanted to dispute that their product was under warranty!
Next they’re asking that I fax them my receipts (which I have!) and then someone will call me back within 48 hours!
I have 2-offices down running on backup routers and they want to argue about warranty when I officered to email them my receipts that minute!
I'll move on to other products and NOT from Linksys!

Other Thoughts: Save your money and time and buy a more stable product unless you enjoy constantly resetting and upgrading your routers!

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
7/18/2008 12:26:09 PM

Rating + 5 Great small business router


Pros: Dependable performance. Price to Value ratio can't be beat. Firewall and Port Forwarding are easy to configure, UPnP Port Forwarding (different tab) lets you do Port Translation (I think many people don't realize this feature is there). PPTP VPN has flawless operation and is great when level of security is not a big issue. Site to Site IPSEC VPN is very secure and has worked very well for me - recommend using RV042 at both ends. DMZ or 2nd Internet port gives great flexibility. Small footprint, wall mountable, now comes with a very small power supply.

Cons: QuickVPN is a horrible waste of time for a Windows environment. It doesn't pass DNS and NetBIOS information properly by itself - it requires custom lmhosts and hosts files, then even after you get it set up "right", it's still glitchy. With proper setup, it will work for certain simple networks (1 server, only PCs with static IPs).

Other Thoughts: I am an IT consultant and have these installed for about 10 of my clients, and I use one at home. I have always kept a spare to use as a service unit in case one goes down, but have never needed it. In 4 years of having these installed, not one has failed. Also, they have never needed rebooting unless there was an issue with the ISP or a power outage. Only one of my clients uses the Site-to-Site VPN (gateway to gateway), and not heavily, so from reading the other reviews, reliability may depend on how heavily the VPN is used and the level of encryption done. If you have a high-bandwidth internet connection and use VPN heavily, then this unit is not even in the league of routers you should be considering. Check out it's big bro, the RV082 - the CPU is twice as fast, it has integrated PSU, and is rack-mountable. Or, you could make sure it has good active air circulation to keep it cool.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

RyanB
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
6/22/2008 6:19:15 PM

Rating + 4 Satisfied


Pros: Easy to configure. Functions as advertised.

Cons: Occasional lockups with device power cycle required. They usually do not effect all functionality, but only the VPN functionality.

Other Thoughts: The unit does get very hot. Since I have it deployed in a highly critical location in a client's network, I purchased two, configured both and have the standby unit ready in case of a failure. Many other reviews I read stated that unit death after less than 12 months of use is common. So far so good for me though.

Did you find this review helpful? Yes No

2speedyc
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
6/6/2008 5:28:58 AM

Rating + 2 Quick VPN is not supported


Pros: Built in VPN features that work sometimes
Small (Like a puppy)
Harmless (Like a puppy)

Cons: Built in VPN features do not work
Web interface is Super Slow
No support

Other Thoughts: I have spent hours on the phone with Linksys techs that have no idea what a packet or session is. QuickVPN Will Not WOrk !
Going to but a D-link or Netgear just to avoid Linksys Pseodou Tier 2 support.
Mind you I made it through to the Business Support line which was a big joke.
There are serious issues with this router creating IPSEC sessions on port 50. It will authenticate users on port 60443 and 443 but never establish a connection.
Linksys does not know what port 50 means (on the phone)

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bad_the_ba
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
5/2/2008 9:51:36 PM

Rating + 4 Overall a good small business router


Pros: Tons of features (some hidden as well). Affordable model for the job it does. Unlike what another reviewer stated... it is NOT a large form factor, in fact it's pretty small. Fairly easy to recover from botched firmware upgrades (after research anyway). In my case, site to site VPN works great with very little downtime (3 locations all with the same ISP, a 4th location on another ISP). Software VPN has been tested with the provided QVPN apps of various versions, as well as XP's VPN connection (we do not use client to router VPN - tested functionality only)

Cons: Heat destroys these things... at least the first several production runs used pretty weak capacitors, and they suffer for it. After running in a moderately warm environment for several months, I've had 3 out of 5 purchased show some significant stability issues. When they become unusable, they hiss audibly, lock up, reset to factory randomly, etc. Linksys is no help at all with this model, and they will not even offer a place to send it to have it repaired.

Other Thoughts: When I have had issues in the past, I ordered a spare to swap out with the suspected "problem routers". Typically if one went down, I always had the "spare" booting with any random firmware version and ready to be put in service. Until I came across this thread on linksysinfo.org, I was figuring I'd eventually have to buy one or two more replacements. If you have one of these older models that hisses and gives a solid DIAG light, a simple fix that applies to most of these heat degradation issues is spelled out here. http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=51384
It's really too bad Linksys couldn't get their act together on this one... a couple years ago I spent an hour on the phone with them with this dead router in my hand. This model has good hardware and features, bad stock capacitors. Dunno if brand new ones share this problem. All said and done, they are worth the money though

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
5/2/2008 7:17:22 AM

Rating + 2 Good while it lasted


Pros: it was rock solid. great features. VPN connection was good. never had to reboot it once

Cons: this was hooked up to a UPS and a couple days ago it just died. I doubt iut was a powerspike. nothing looked burnt on the inside except it was making a noise as if a fan died but there was no fan to be found

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
4/17/2008 11:36:09 PM

Rating + 3 Just OK


Pros: 1 - Performance
2 - easy to set up

Cons: 1 - Support sucks
2 - short life span. I have to replace 2 out of 5 just within two years.
3 - site-to-site vpn is not stable. have to reboot at least one out of 5 router every week.

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Mike
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
4/8/2008 10:23:17 PM

Rating + 5 Follow up


Pros: Great Value, Great Logging and more features than almost any consumer would ever need. VPN works great and without issue whether it be end-to-end or Client/Server (Windows XP PPTP - don't like client software). New firmware adds more Client tunnels.

Cons: Had difficulty keeping one unit stable using Time/Warner (1.2mbps connection) with many users at the office. This is the only trouble that I have experienced of three units from 8mo old to 18mo old.

Other Thoughts: Replaced the unit w/a new unit and now its fine.. Have old unit running at home and tunneled to the new unit w/o issue. Old unit at my home (COX cable) has no issues and has no difficulties w/25mbps download rate w/1mpbs upload rates.. Don't quite know why it was quirky under Time/Warner unless it was possibly the increased traffic from small business office. No diag light of death yet on any units.

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The dude
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg
3/31/2008 9:18:55 AM

Rating + 5 Excellent product, get another MCSE :)


Pros: Got 2 of these babies & created a tunnel between 2 Cable Modems ! VPN tunnel works like a charm, must tweak it a little (if you want to get better performance...less encryption & turn compression on !)

Cons: None...For the price, you will not find a better product ! Read the manual before you configure it, not for newbies.

Other Thoughts: Haven't tested this with Verizon DSL yet...Has anyone made this work with Verizon's Westell 327W? Please let me know...

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Captain Keys
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
2/22/2008 10:46:35 AM

Rating + 4


Pros: Cost effective. Reliable.

Cons: Bulky form factor.

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awheat2000
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
2/21/2008 10:56:20 AM

Rating + 5 awheat2000


Pros: Very rich in features. Excellent upgrade from the home routers. You can really tweak your network traffic any way you want. Good size, shape, and construction (metal, sturdy). Great for use with web site hosting. Can be stacked 3 or 4 high (but cooling would become a much bigger concern).

Cons: Need to keep the sides clear as they are used for cooling. Power adapter plugs into right side instead of back. Indicator lights are simple, indicating activity on the port and nothing more.

Other Thoughts: Currently used for light duty, few ports in use. Seems very stable and doesn't run hot. I keep the sides clear and most of my equipment funnels through other switches into just a couple of ports on this unit. The switches DO run hot, however, but they handle the bulk of the internal traffic and they are used at 1000mbs. This router handles internal traffic up to 100mbs. It may be the case that this unit will run hot if you put it under a heavier load (which could contribute to decreased reliability). Make sure to keep well ventilated and cooled, as you would with any enterprise computer equipment.

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Tank6585
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
2/13/2008 10:16:23 AM

Rating + 5 Works great


Pros: Very stable, VPN works good and also stable. High throughput with firewall on unlike other devices, handled all the way up to a 25mb burst.

Cons: Initial setup can be a little hard for a newbie.

Other Thoughts: Great router with a lot of features for a low price.

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Madness
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg
2/8/2008 9:41:15 AM

Rating + 5 Great Product


Pros: Great product. The interface is awesome! Offerers many VPN options. We needed 5 VPN pass thrus and this does 50 so worked great for that. Offerers load balance between 2 internet connections. THe DMZ port is awesome, u can turn the internet ports on and off. The interface shows you a picture of the device like cisco stuff and shows whats up and down.

Cons: Just wish it was a little cheaper.

Other Thoughts: This is a must for small to mid-sized businesses. Has all the power of firewall, VPN, and switching you need.

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Brad
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/23/2008 3:08:21 PM

Rating + 2 High Failure Rate


Pros: While it runs, great. Does what it should

Cons: I have about 10 of these at clients. Constantly replacing them (usually after the waranty is up). Diag light goes solid, and thats it. All of them die the same diag light death. They seem to run hot....

Other Thoughts: I'd stay away if you have to go far to replace them when they die (they will).

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N/A
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
1/17/2008 10:59:03 AM

Rating + 2 One-to-one NAT does not work


Pros: The web interface for the thing is pretty slick.

Cons: It doesn't work as advertised. I've got a PBX to which I need the RV042 to translate a public IP to my private IP and it just won't do it.

Other Thoughts: I've searched the Linksys website and their Live Chat feature does not support the RV042 nor are there any actual answers on their message board, just lots of questions.

I expect the VPN functionality works, but can't use the thing while it doesn't support 1-2-1 NAT.

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The Messenger
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
1/10/2008 10:28:18 AM

Rating + 1 Dead after year of used


Pros: Easy setup. Hope things still work after 1 year.

Cons: Bought 4 of this. They are working great but after a year of used. Each one of them went dead. Tried update the firmware but no luck.

Other Thoughts: If you are not looking for VPN capability or DMZ option. Better not buy this product.

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js
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/4/2008 9:14:48 AM

Rating + 2 hardware failure


Pros: Product rv042 worked great when it was under warranty. I have always recommended the wrt line to customers.

Cons: I have moved many products and expected better service. I have had much success with wrt series products. I expected better from this product (rv042).

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RAA
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
12/1/2007 5:15:43 PM

Rating + 5 Exellent Router


Pros: Great features for the price. This Router is a solid performer! Good VPN features that works. All in all, it is an exellent piece of gear.

Cons: Considering the price, perfromance and features. I cannot see any cons.

Other Thoughts: if you need VPN access, get this router. Don't bother with the cheaper versions. It pays to spend the extra $ for good solutions.

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Mobius
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
11/28/2007 2:59:43 PM

Rating + 4 Very Solid


Pros: It just works. Works well with VPN, VOIP, and all the other basic things you want a firewall / router to do.

Cons: Requires some basic knowledge of networking security to monitor any wireless networking points.

Other Thoughts: My company uses this router / firewall in our corporate HQ. It's actually more stable than the 2 year old Cisco PIX we had. Wish I'd thought to look on Newegg when we bought it. We appearently over paid.

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KTMNealio
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
11/28/2007 1:22:42 PM

Rating + 5 Awesome


Pros: Very configurable, you can set up configurations and then disable them (so you don't loose your setup), fast, reliable, easy to use interface

Cons: Have not found any

Other Thoughts: I've had this up for over 2 years and haven't had any issues at all. I've configured the IP forwarding and opened ports to run web servers, game server, ftp, and remote desktop with no issues.

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Scott
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
10/30/2007 11:02:33 AM

Rating + 5 So far so good


Pros: Easy setup, stable.
I have one routing our office of 25 systems. I also have a second one (3 months old) at a remote location cofigured for a IP phone/VPN, all is well.

Cons: I've read some bad things about them on the net, but haven't had an issue.

Other Thoughts: It's an inexpensive router with great features. Although i've read some negative things about them, i haven't had a problem. I'm planning on buying another for my home (for VPN)

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Mike
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
10/24/2007 4:40:36 PM

Rating + 3 Going Bad


Pros: Great features, all work..

Cons: 2nd unit I bought 6mo ago is beginning to go bad..

Other Thoughts: I've written a few reviews now for this product, mostly glowing. I have three units.. 1yr old, 6mo old, and 3mo.. 6mo old gets about 20x the usage as the others and is going bad - intermittent drop outs - and it IS the RV042. Going to get a replacement and get this RA'd, however, with everything I have read, if this becomes an issue in general, I may have to replace them all.. I posted in the past that perhaps it was heat related and that mine were kept relatively cool - perhaps its a traffic issue.

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IT guy with BA
Tech Level: high
Ownership: less than 1 day
10/23/2007 10:27:56 PM

Rating + 5 You CERTIFICATION GUYS


Pros: awesome

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: Its sad that you certification ppl like to brag that your MCSE and such, because anyone who gets their BA in the IT field will go further and make more than you. Im sure you guys will just keep bragging though about your certifications.

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
10/17/2007 2:15:14 PM

Rating + 4 Great device for small business network


Pros: Reliable and Easy to setup.
PPTP software VPN tunnel is a snap to setup.
Hardware to hardware VPN tunnel reliable and easy to setup.

Cons: Don't waste time on Linksys QuickVPN or dealing with tech support or RMA. If this device or any other LInksys device goes bad just buy a new one. You will save money because of the amount of time wasted trying to get a replacment.

Other Thoughts: Good low cost firewall router.

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Mike
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
10/11/2007 9:28:45 AM

Rating + 5


Pros: First of all me say I'm an MCSA. VPN works well. Never had any problems.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Just because your MCSE/CCNP like the guy above me. Doesn't mean you know what your doing.

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
10/5/2007 4:34:53 AM

Rating + 2 VPN Client does not work


Pros: None really, all setups on these types of routers are easy.

Cons: First let me say, I'm a MCSE and CCNP, setup of routers are easy.
After hours of tech support, the QuickVPN Client works 20% of the time. Don't buy this router, there are a lot more that do work and cheaper.
LinkSys has released the product too early.

Other Thoughts: Don't purchase this one.

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Mike
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
10/1/2007 3:26:22 AM

Rating + 5 Over a Year Now


Pros: Great VPN, Great Performance, Great Value, Great Buy..

Cons: No Gbit switch - but can't have everything. EasyVPN is a pain in the behind.. Has nothing to do w/the hardware, so not really a con. Use WinXP PPTP..

Other Thoughts: Had this over a year now; bought two others, one 6mos. old and one 3mos. old. Latest firmware on all - no trouble at all.. No Internet drops, no diag light of death - all good.. Recommend latest firmware for best activity logging.. Have used the heck out of this thing and am intimately familiar with everything it can do by now.. One setup for cable, one for DSL and one for t1, some w/ISP authentication, some w/o. Some as firewall only, some w/DHCP as well. All have end-to-end keep alive VPN connections and PPTP tunnels setup.. All are operating flawlessly. Waiting for a Gbit version - hopefully they'll include a fan as well.. I'm can only gues that these failures I keep seeing reported are heat related? Mine are kept relatively cool.

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hobie
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
9/17/2007 6:37:07 AM

Rating + 5 Been great


Pros: Saw all the negative feedback and had to put in my 2 cents as well. I have 3 RV042's at different locations as firewall and VPN router. All of them have been great. Have not returned any.

Cons: None

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TSC Tech
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
9/14/2007 4:27:22 PM

Rating + 5 Excellent


Pros: Great Product would buy again.

Cons: Can't think of any.

Other Thoughts: I wrote this because I saw all the negative feedback and mine has been nothing but perfect i just looked at the uptime and its 2 months 14 days. I don't know about you, but thats not too bad to me. I own two of these and looking to buy 3 more soon.

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The Computer Guy
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
9/11/2007 9:12:21 AM

Rating + 2 Latest Firmware = Junk


Pros: Great features for the price.

Cons: As someone else posted these things seemed to be destined to fail. I've had to return 2 now to Linksys for warranty replacement.

Other Thoughts: It would seem the latest firmware seems to be the issue. This unit was working perfectly until I added a Windows Vista machine to my home network. I could surf just fine on the Windows XP machines but I had problems with Vista. After reading about changes in the Firmware revisions on Linksys's site specifically for Vista I applied the latest firmware. 24 hours later the router died. Nothing but an orange system light. 2nd router FROM linksys same issue. Latest firmware, dead 24 hours later. Linksys replaced it a 2nd time but I will not be using it anymore. I upgraded to a NetGear FVS318.

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HOSH
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
7/11/2007 6:13:22 PM

Rating + 2 Good while it lasted


Pros: VPN worked for first year same with the router.

Cons: After a year at 2 locations even with firmware update they are keep dropping the internet.

Other Thoughts: Setup one at gaming location and WWW host for group mid to light internet trafic. Setup two my house heavy usage 30-100GB/month BT and gaming. Both died same time.

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ham4fun
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
6/25/2007 2:03:14 PM

Rating + 2 Squeel & Fail


Pros: Lots of features

Cons: We have 20+ in the field. They are dropping like flies. The squeal seems to be the 10KHZ oscillation in the power circuit. We have a count of 6 making the noise. 3 are dead and afraid to distribute the others. :(

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Compu-Ease Head Tech
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
6/21/2007 5:19:19 PM

Rating + 3 Long-Term Loser


Pros: Good price point, great setup instructions and troubleshooting guide on CD. Until it dies its an absolute workhorse.

Cons: I purchased 6 of these in the last 3 years, all have died now starting about 6 months ago. All were in different locations and UPS protected. There must be a flaw that is causing this common prblem in the product line. Bottom line from my experience -they are not built to last!

Other Thoughts: Tunnels are a bit on the slow side. Great security features. Linksys follows through with good tech support. Plan to buy one of thses every few years!

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ReidMan
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
6/14/2007 8:13:50 PM

Rating + 5 Works Great


Pros: Setup was easy, VPN was a snap.
Very stable has been on for months no resets.Host multiple VPN connections from remotes. Manage from remote access no problem.

Cons: Cant think of any, except mabey better clent side VPN software Quick VPN works but it's basic.

Other Thoughts: Dont know why others are having issues you need to have an understanding of VPN networks to run a VPN. Most firewalls, and even antiviruses will block VPN access, so start there first. Norton 2007 worm protection blocks VPN.

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Dodger
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
6/12/2007 5:25:43 PM

Rating + 5 Great Router


Pros: This is a great router. I've had two for 6 months now. Both work fine. It was a trick to setup the VPN, but the online Linnksys support was helpful. Just keep playing with it... it'll work. It's got all the features you need.

Cons: The VPNs are tricky, you've got to have them perfect or they won't work. But once their setup, they just keep working... Other than performance, it's like having the remote network attached directly... way cool.

My only complain is the report on what devices are connected. It's a little confussing.

Other Thoughts: I'm planning on buying more...

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bh5505
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
6/8/2007 6:57:03 PM

Rating + 1 piece of junk


Pros: impressive list of features... IPsec, Dual WAN, VPN endpoint

Cons: never got the VPN to work well, constantly made loud buzzing noise, had the flashing amber DIAG light death 3 years after i bought it

Other Thoughts: nowhere near worth the price, linksys support is not helpful

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ndeman3
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg
5/29/2007 3:07:24 PM

Rating + 2 Lasted about 2 weeks


Pros: Worked very well for about 1 week. VPN was easy to setup and QuickVPN was easy to configure.

Cons: After about 1 week, VPN connections began dropping. About a week after that, router functions started timing out and Internet access through the RV042 became sporadic.

Other Thoughts: Based on my experience and the other negative reviews of this product, I would stay away from this router.

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
4/21/2007 10:43:18 AM

Rating + 2 rv042


Pros: Worked-well initially. But -- see cons.

Cons: But after warranty expired, intermittent failures and shortly thereafter not dependable at all. Another Linksys router BESFX41 is also starting to have intermittent failures after the warranty.

No more Linksys products for me!!!

Other Thoughts: Linksys must be using low reliability parts. Especially in light of all the other failures I read about.

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BangaliBhai
Tech Level: average
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
4/16/2007 8:01:39 AM

Rating + 2 My RV042 Just Died


Pros: The router performed as expected for 2 years since it was put in service. The set up was easy and VPN worked OK but kind of slow but bearable.

Cons: It had occasional hiccups. I upgraded the firmware several times. I did not call Linksys because I did not have the time to mess with it. But anyway, my router died this past weekend. The amber “diag” light kept coming on after reset and I had no network. I called Linksys and they told me it's dead and there is nothing they can do because it’s out of warranty and they cannot help me. I was very disappointed. I paid approx $200 for it when I bought it on 2/25/2005 and my expectation was that it would run for several (5+) years. I have not seen one just go out like this 15+ IT life.

Other Thoughts: This router is comparatively cheaper than its counter parts. Now I know; Linksys have been using cheap hardware one that could go bad in 2-3 years time.

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N/A
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
4/6/2007 9:53:57 AM

Rating + 3 This router is not great


Pros: Dual WAN load balancing is good but only when it really works.

Cons: Reliability is a problem for this router. I hope, they will fix this soon because this is the only router with Dual-WAN for this price. I guess it is cheep for a reason.

Other Thoughts: I have DSL and Cable for performance and mostly reliability. Even with latest firmware (1.3.8.2 (Feb 12 2007 10:43:08), the big problem of this router is still reliability. Reliability is NONE. Connection drops quite frequently although router states it is connected. My old Netgear was more reliable.
Asked Linksys tech support about creating PPTP VPN tunnel to corporate office. I get this answer: “We are not trained for that, call Microsoft”. They just could have said "Router doesn't support PPTP client tunnel". Linksys support is horrible and arrogant.

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Dodger
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
2/17/2007 7:11:52 AM

Rating + 5 Wow!


Pros: Wow, what a router. Man this thing has the features. I disagree with a previous review, for your basic configuration it is plug and play. But, with so many options, the advanced configurations can be tricky - in my opinion this is an advantage of a capable router. Run cool and quite. Looks nice.

What I like:
- lots of port forward values; for one application I have about 25 ports to forward, I don't see the limit in the documentation, but this router handles at least 25 of them.
- multiple schedules; want to block the kids from playing WOW all night long, but would like a weekday and different weekend schedule. No problem here.

Cons: None

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bad_the_ba
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
12/12/2006 1:01:33 PM

Rating + 5 Outstanding, but technical


Pros: Loaded with features, I can't think of anything I've wanted to do, whether it's on the LAN or through the internet, that this router couldn't handle. I own two, and have sold 4 or 5 others. I have them set up in multiple locations with WRT54G, GL, and GS's connected as WiFi access points. I've been using it since firmware 1.3.1, and I can say that as they've updated firmware it has gotten a lot more stable, including features like VPN software client access. DynDNS service works like a charm.

Cons: Quite technical, no such thing as plug and play with this model. Linksys support is a building full of idiots.

Other Thoughts: That first con is not really a con... U should know what you are buying and whether it is beyond your level of expertise before purchase.

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Zbig Jerkhov
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
12/9/2006 4:59:55 AM

Rating + 4 Good VPN router


Pros: Has features that consumer routers don't have, such as a setup page for easily fixing the IP addresses handed out by the DHCP server. Had no problem using the PTPP VPN feature. All that is required to make PPTP VPN work is setting up the user. The setup pages may be misleading to some. If you just want to connect your remote computer to your home or office network, just go to the setup tab for PTPP, enter a user and skip the rest. I just used the Windows client to connect, and it was a breeze.

Cons: Does not support TZO.com for dynamic dns service. This is puzzling, since other Linksys routers I've seen support TZO.

Other Thoughts: If you want more than just a basic router for your home network, for example, if you need fixed IP addresses and maybe want to run a server and would like VPN, this router will be a good choice.

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
9/21/2006 12:09:22 PM

Rating + 4 RV042


Pros: pretty good dual WAN SOHO router. Setup is easy but consumers or novices might have trouble with it as there are many features which requires a working knowledge of networking.

Cons: The units I purchased for customers seemed to overhead. After 1 day in service the cover of the router would be hot to the touch. This might account for another reviewers mention of high failure rate.

Other Thoughts: returned 3 of the 6 RV042s purchased as they wer overheating [hot on touch NOT warm]. of the 3 working units, performance is top notch.

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Mike
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg
9/18/2006 7:16:19 PM

Rating + 5 Mistaken


Pros: Appending to my prior review. Apparently QuickVPN does do IPsec; I disabled it on the router and it failed; so,, you can use QuickVPN for IPsec (just no preshared keying) or WinXP for PPTP, just simply log in the user name and password in the client screens of the router; its that easy (different screens for each different method) - and don't mess with the tunneling setup screen unless you're doing end to end apparently.. oops!!

Cons: Hmmm, let me see,,, premature evaluation maybe???

Other Thoughts: Users manual says this thing does 30 tunnels; when you get it you find out it does 50!! Firmware update/upgrade??? I'm not complaining.. Newegg was great as always..

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Mike
Tech Level: somewhat high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
This user purchased this item from Newegg
9/18/2006 1:40:59 PM

Rating + 5 VPN Review


Pros: Works great out of the box. No real issues considering its a consumer grade product. My unit came with latest firmware which has the PPTP server function (not shown in manual). I thought the logging was much better than any other unit I have owned.

Cons: VPN is slow; but perhaps this is just a byproduct of encryption. PPTP VPN is really easy to setup. QuickVPN is un-neccessary, can connect with standard XP PPTP connection. However, cannot client connect using IPsec using XP or QuickVPN. Perhaps this is because there are too many IPsec options on the unit and they lack this with the XP client software (QuickVPN does not seem to have IPsec option). Do not have another unit to test IPsec end to end.

Other Thoughts: Can probably connect using XP client IPsec if someone knows the magic hashing combinations; again XP IPsec client has few options and the unit has many; they must match in order to work.

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Joel
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
8/30/2006 8:28:59 PM

Rating + 5 Pretty cool for remote access


Pros: It was a little hard to get QuickVPN to work but when it did it's awesome. I can download the utility on any pc and access any computer on the remote end using Windows RDC. I have installed about 6 of these now. VPN tunnel isn't that hard to configure if you have one of these on each end, little bit harder if you are doing this with another brand.

Cons: None really pretty impressed.

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maquaro
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
7/25/2006 5:29:03 AM

Rating + 4 Solid Performer


Pros: Very solid performance, never a hickup. This is used at a client facility with a sattelite data link. More bells and whistles than you would want in 1 box.

Cons: Just setting up the IP/Sec VPN options may be difficult for some users who have not setup before.

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N/A
Tech Level: average
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
7/20/2006 7:12:01 PM

Rating + 5 Funny, - Works fine for me


Pros: I have purchased several of these items, and I plan on a few more, I have never
Had an issue with VPN, Access rules, or port forwarding setups on these,

Cons: Cons, well I would agree that the tech support is a big issue.

But I just stick with the firt rule I leadrned along time ago, if it dosent work send it back.

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Narg
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
7/18/2006 1:51:55 PM

Rating + 5 Solid Product


Pros: Extremely solid performance for small business needs. VPN is easy and quick with any Linksys or Cisco product (don't go overboard with settings and it's really easy.) First router I've owned that the software VPN client Actually Worked!

Cons: Logging is bad, not very verbose or helpful. You have to know what you are doing, or you won't like this product, it's not for amatuers. Software based VPN client setup a little confusing, but it does work.

Other Thoughts: We have not seen any of the problems others state here. Once this router replaced our "consumer level" router our connectivity and reliability went through the roof! We use this router in the main office with the cheaper Linksys VPN boxes in remotes. Easy, quick and it works. Even allows simple Windows networking without jumping through hoops.

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F1 Broomfield
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
6/8/2006 10:55:29 AM

Rating + 5 Best Hardware Route Under $200


Pros: Dual Wan or Wan and DMZ, One-to-One NAT allowing multiple Class A addresses to be routed to internal network clients. Easy web interface. And it is not round or curvey or white or anything. It is as big as it needs to be and rectangular and looks like a serious piece of hardware.

Cons: Nothing yet.

Other Thoughts: Configuration time was less than 15 minutes to be up. In an hour I hade the thing grokked. Very easy to administer. I now host 5 class A ip addresses through one WAN connection.

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ITpro
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
5/18/2006 4:19:28 PM

Rating + 1 My experience was terrible


Pros: Inexpensive

Cons: From the first day out of the box this unit was nothing but trouble. Our Internet connection was horrible. I found out that the default MTU was set to 1500. Once I changed it to 1492 the first problem was resolved. Then, we tried to use the VPN for remote access and couldn't connect. After jumping through hoops for tech support over several days, we finally found a combination of settings that would work with QuickVPN. After the connection issue was resolved, we found that we couldn't access shared resources consistently. Connection seems OK, I can ping and telnet, but try to access a share on the server and it just hangs. We tried everything reasonable and tech support finally said it was defective. Linksys said to send it back to NewEgg and I am... in exchange for something else this time.

Other Thoughts: Over the last 2 weeks I've called tech support 4 times and used the chat support 4 times. Hold times have been over an hour! The workers don't seem to have a clue or know anything about networking. Sorry to say that it's the worst tech support I've ever encountered. No more Linksys products for me.

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N/A
Tech Level: high
Ownership: more than 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
5/4/2006 1:36:35 AM

Rating + 5 Excellent


Pros: Very stable, plenty of RAM, highly configurable, easy to use, won't crater under heavy P2P load

Cons: Need additional switch for gigabit Ethernet, VPN may be tricky for some users

Other Thoughts: I use this router for a residential cable connection and between 6 to 8 systems. Also combined with gigabit swtich, 2 wireless APs, and print server. Net use is very connection intensive. Under these circumtances I could not find a "home broadband router" that did not need to be reset on a regular basis. That is no longer a problem. VPN functionality works well. Definitely worth the money.

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Scotto
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
4/12/2006 2:01:51 PM

Rating + 5 Great little router


Pros: Easy setup, by and large all options are pretty straight-forward. This router has been running in a biz environment with 20 internet-intensive machines and has NOT crashed once.

Cons: Poor logging.

Other Thoughts: We're making the most out of this router, using it under heavy load. We're implementing: IP forwarding, point-to-point VPN, firewalling of various ports, dual WAN (DSL/cable; seems to work great), assignment of certain outgoing traffic to WAN1 or WAN2, DHCP (with some static entries), a couple of custom routes, and probably leveraging some other features I'm foretting. Again, NO crashes. I'm actually amazed, as I've had some pretty sketchy routers by the same company in the past. Maybe I just got lucky on the firmware that came with it (haven't felt the need to upgrade for obvious reasons)..

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PaulB
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 week to 1 month
4/9/2006 8:06:37 PM

Rating + 2 Poor Dual Wan Function


Pros: This router is cheap and does have dual wan ports. I was able to set it up to connect to a Comcast Cable modem and a Verizon DSL modem. It was a pain to get it up but in the end I did get an IP from both ISPs.

Cons: I wanted to load balance 2 WANs and this router could not do it for me. I talked to Linksys support and they first told me that there was no such thing as an "RV042". This guy had NO clue what he was talking about. I got an IP from comcast and was able to speed test at 500 to 1200kbps. Pages loaded very slowly. After connecting the DSL modem it would speed test at 3000kbps and seemed to work fine. Cable modem direct to one machine gave full 6600kps. This thing just could not deal with a cable modem in any mode I put it on. Must be a firmware issue, however I did try several versions. I replaced it with a HotBrick LB2 and everything works perfectly now.

Other Thoughts: After spending hours working with this router it was clear that even if I got it to work I wasn't about to trust the device. I bought it for the security of redundant WANs but it would stop responding most every time I applied changes. Maybe this thing will work oneday but I would pass on it at this point unless your looking for a power cycling, hair pulling "good" time.

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NetADMIN
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
1/30/2006 9:44:32 AM

Rating + 5 Sweet router...


Pros: VPN is a piece of cake to config and use. Make sure you use the QuickVPN client through mfg's website. As long as you usederstand how VPN's work, and both ends of your network are preped (differing IPs), this will work like a champ! Firewall is stable and easy to config. Very reliable and stable in a small business environment. Multiwan is a NICE feature!

Cons: The logging on this router stinks. It could be much more in depth and faster. DDNS does not support some of the bigger services out there. You can use a software based client for that as a work around and it works well. If you have a really fast internet connection (or multiple ones), you can max out the throughput of this router quickly.

Other Thoughts: All-in-all, this router rocks. You won't find one with similar options even close to the cost of this one. I have been VERY pleased overall with it's performance and features.

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Probes
Tech Level: average
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
12/28/2005 6:05:10 AM

Rating + 2 returned this item


Pros: Looked good from the specs - could not get this to work with Comcast Business internet service.

Cons: Little support - I hope you have a headset for your wait on hold.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

Gregory C. Johnson
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
12/21/2005 11:53:57 AM

Rating + 2 Dynamic DNS broken in firmware 1.3.7.2


Pros: As listed in previous posting

Cons: As listed in previous posting.

Other Thoughts: Update 2005-12-21:

After a hard reset on the device, DDNS functionalityi is restored. There appears to be some configuration state that triggers this error, but I have yet to find exactly what it is. For use "out of the box" this device may be adequate.

Also, a previous reviewer's observation that there is no free VPN client may have been resolved with Linksys's QuickVPN.

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Gregory C. Johnson
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
12/19/2005 10:14:46 AM

Rating + 1 Dynamic CDS broken in firmware 1.3.7.2


Pros: Nice web interface appearance compared to BEFSR41.
Case is wall-mountable.
Feature set very complete, when it works

Cons: DDNS (Dynamic DNS) update is limited to three providers, two of which are in Chineese. The third is DynDNS.Org.

Other Thoughts: The DynDNS Dynamic DNS service FAQ indicates:

My Linksys router says "DDNS Server Is Currently Closed" whenever I try to set it up to update my hostname - what gives?

Linksys chose to ignore our published specifications when writing the update software that they built into some of their routers. As such, these products became broken as soon as we made a change to our underlying infrastructure, which would have been transparent had they followed our guidelines. You should disable the update functionality of your router, complain to Linksys, and use a software client until such a time that Linksys chooses to fix their product."

Since this note has been there literally for years, I foolishly assumed it referenced ancient products. Having just spent two hours talking to Linksys this is apparently not the case.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

bpabs
Tech Level: high
Ownership: 1 month to 1 year
This user purchased this item from Newegg
11/28/2005 11:54:31 PM

Rating + 3 So-so rating


Pros: For price, it has all the features of high-end routers and most of the time works.

Cons: Several units I've had replaced. Two due to power supply problem, one due to the unit simply losing communication from the LAN.

Other Thoughts: Overall, it's a good product, but I have my doubts. I've installed about 7 of these, but with a high-rate of problems/failure. Linksys has always resolved the problem.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

George G. Bear
Tech Level:
Ownership:
11/21/2005 6:45:42 PM

Rating + 5 New fireware added features


Comments: I have had this router for several months and it has performed very well. We have had DSL and cable internet connected at the same time. No issues but with secure sites like banks and doing taxes on line because the router flops back and forth between the two Internet providers. We fixed this by forcing two different IP ranges to the two different WAN ports. We then used the routers DHCP server to set static IPs our desktops and also had it give out two DNS numbers (one for the router one for Server 2003 running active directory [DHCP not used on the server]). We got everything to work just fine but VPN set ups (We did not work much with VPN stuff). If one of the Internet connections fails the the router will switch all Internet traffic to the working connection (If it can detect the failure; we had some issues with it not seeing the failures we had with Comcast.)

We were even able to run a web & FTP server in house that was visable on the Internet for friends and family out of state on only one of the WAN ports (DSL)saving the other WAN port (cable)for our Internet trafic. The new firmware added blocking of web sites by key word. A short 10 word list can block a lot of trash that is on the Internet.

We have had Linksys BEFSR41 & BEFSX41 Routers and D-Links 4300 Wireless Gaming Router. We like the Linksys RV042 the best. The D-Link router will not assign two DNS numbers on the LAN side of the Router which can cause issues if you have two DNS servers on your network also the D-Link went bad in less than 30 days (smelled like a burnt match). New Egg replaced it for us; Thanks New Egg.

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PRACARULO
Tech Level:
Ownership:
This user purchased this item from Newegg
11/7/2005 5:21:18 PM

Rating + 1 Bad boy!


Comments: This router was replaced by Linksys 3 times already. When you see an amber light... just send it to Linksys, don't waist any time... Stay away... Aslo the dual internet port to bond 2 connections is useless... just dosen'r work period. I told you...stay away or wait for a better firmware..

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

Chris
Tech Level:
Ownership:
This user purchased this item from Newegg
10/30/2005 11:49:01 PM

Rating + 4 Excellent Router - and vpn does now work...


Comments: I bought one of these a while ago for our startup software company - now about 14 people.

Overall it is very solid.

The redundant WAN uplinks are great.
The interface is great.

I am not convinced about the auto switching on the uplinks but even so, software control of the uplink is nice - we have a 6MB radio based internet and a shared T1 (other tenants in our building) as a backup.

Still all of our internal network problems have gone away since switching from consumer routers/firewalls/dhcp servers to the rv042

Lastly, in terms of VPN, the story has changed recently.

Before last week, I was never able to get the VPN to work when trying to use the microsoft or other clients.

However, recently linksys released their quickvpn client and associated firmware upgrade for the rv042.

Last week I tried this out and it seems to work ok. Very easy to administer via the web interface and almost zero config on the client side.

Still, other client side routers can cause problems (as with other vpn solutions I have used), and the error messages are useless. And linksys still hasnt relased the software package as they have for their other vpn router to upgrade to 30 clients instead of 5. Kinda lame as the software is really just doing all of the painful windows config for you.

But overall, I am still going to buy another one for home use as it is much better than other consumer [junk] routers I have used....

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

scorpionmintred
Tech Level:
Ownership:
10/12/2005 8:18:45 AM

Rating + 4 Fast and reliable


Comments: Bought this a couple of months ago for a small office with both DSL and a cable modem. Load balancing seems to work reliably, firewall is fairly simple yet effective. This gets a 4 out of 5 because the VPN was difficult to set up with WinXP and the linksys VPN client.. well, I never got it working. (The VPN wasn't a deal breaker for me anyway. We are using a Win2k3 server for VPN for active directory integration).

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Joe
Tech Level:
Ownership:
10/11/2005 12:03:06 AM

Rating + 4 VPN Setup Not Bad with QuickVPN Client


Comments: As long as you have a computer running Windows XP or 2000 (which support IPSec), VPN setup with this router is not too bad if you use the QuickVPN client software downloadable from the Linksys web page for the RV042. One cool thing about the QuickVPN software is that it automatically creates an IPSec policy (which can be half the battle in getting VPNs to work). Be aware that you cannot use the Windows Firewall (in XP) with the QuickVPN client (as long as your firewall supports NAT-T, it will support VPN traffic).

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Patrick
Tech Level:
Ownership:
10/10/2005 9:01:07 AM

Rating + 1 VPN Router? HA!


Comments: Even though Linksys calls this a VPN Router, the word VPN doesn't appear one time in any of the documents included with this router (online or otherwise). DO NOT GET THIS ROUTER if you want to do client to gateway connections... that is unless you want to buy a VPN Client software to make it work right (like SafeNet SoftRemoteLT, or GreenBow).

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

N/A
Tech Level:
Ownership:
10/9/2005 9:50:49 PM

Rating + 5


Comments: I love these routers. They work, They work very well... Better than a $xxx 3Com.. Weird VPN setup but everything else works quite well.

Do firmware updates as soon as you get the hardware.

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N/A
Tech Level:
Ownership:
6/21/2005 1:33:24 PM

Rating + 4


Comments: Good router, works well when using VPN. Make sure you apply the most current pdate to the router.

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N/A
Tech Level:
Ownership:
11/20/2004 4:30:56 PM

Rating + 5 Highly recomend


Comments: This is an excellent router. I bought it so that I can have backup ISP, which this router supports. Setup was easy and no problems so far.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful. Did you? Yes No

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