Linksys Wireless-G Broadband Router with SRX200 WRT54GX2

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

This unit may work fine with non-Mac systems, but it sure screws up the bandwidth for Macs! I found it to really screw up the Vonage phone device by sucking up the bandwidth for itself. The iMac with the wireless connection showed the signal strength to be anemic compared to some other unit in the neighborhood that was outputting full strength.

I’m guessing that the multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) antennas apparently were having a conflict with each other and perhaps even canceling each other out.  Okay, maybe not, but one has to wonder why this unit performed so poorly. To take advantage of the technology without taking down the rest of the network is to hook this up to systems that have SRX (Speed and Range eXpansion) technology on board. Other systems such as AirPort are going to take a back seat with this device and landlines (wired systems) apparently are affected as well.

Anyhow, I cannot recommend this product for Mac-environments. I was warned and now I know why. But that doesn’t explain the poor performance with the Vonage unit. 

I also was stymied for a little while as I connected the Cat5 cables to the device. No indicator lights were coming on and I thought the unit was defective. What I had to do was really force the Cat5 connectors to click in all the way and the female connectors were really tight. And this was with all ports.

I took the automatic default instead of picking one of 11 channels. I just can’t believe how slow this ran using non-SRX technology.