A good basic 802.11g wireless SOHO router / AP.

Linksys has a history of offering great value in small home and home office networking devices. The WRT54G continues and in many ways improves upon this legacy. This is even more noteworthy as Linksys was purchased by Cisco as this product was rolling out, and Cisco has if anything been beneficial to Linksys overall. This will be explained more later.

The structure of this review will be to discuss SOHO routers, and what they generally offer, then to discuss 802.11 with emphasis on 802.11b & 802.11g. Finally discussion will become WRT54G specific.

Linksys provides 800 support, and support in the linksys forum of dslreports.com. Generally the online support is superior to the phone support. It is very common for a Linksys device, including this router to be on a $10 rebate, check the Linksys website to find out if you can save a few more bucks over a low purchase price online.

Home and SOHO Routers - Why they exist & what they do.

Home and SOHO routers are used by many families and small home businesses largely to facilitate the sharing of a broadband connection between several PC's. Generally a broadband ISP provides a single IP address for a user or home office, that IP is shared by the router using a feature called Network Address Translation (NAT for short).

NAT makes it easy for a small to medium number of PC's (and pc-like devices) to share an IP without realizing they are sharing at all. Each PC gets assigned an IP address of it's on the local area network (the LAN, that portion of the home network which is usually within the home or office of the router owner). The individual LAN addresses are aggregated and translated when internet access occurs by the router which keeps track of which LAN IP made which request on the WAN (the Wide Area Network or the Internet for purposes of this review). Each PC (and pc-like) device is unaware of sharing an IP, and believes it is accessing the internet directly itself. Most of the time, this works very smoothly and is a great way for a home or a small home office to economically share bandwidth without great cost or effort.

A side effect of NAT, is some protection from a bit of the nonsense which goes on generally across all internet. For the most part, in a default configuration, users on the LAN are protected from unsolicited probes and scans by the NAT (which usually just ignores them). While this is not as robust as a firewall, it has some of the features of a firewall, and sometimes NAT is considered to be a firewall or firewall like feature (you will find this vigorously contested on parts of the net, I'm only offering information that there is a dispute not taking a side).

Generally it is safer to surf the web with a small NAT router than without it. For most users the difficulties and loss of capability is either unnoticeable or is worth the small grief's here and there.

What the heck is all the 802.11 stuff

The 802.11 stuff you may read about is a series of related standards which define how wireless communication is accomplished in such a way that various vendors products can all communicate with each other. Without 802.11 each vendor would be potentially writing to it's own standard and be incompatible with other vendors product. The result of 802.11 is the wireless products become more like commodities, and this is great for consumers. So users benefit, companies also benefit as while the margins on commodities are smaller the pie (market) is much larger than any single company could ever hope to make. Thus 802.11 standards help everyone. The organization which certifies products, indicating they meet the standards and are interoperable is Wi-Fi.

The conversion of a wireless network to a wired network is accomplished by an access point (which has an Ethernet output interpretation of the wireless network, it's usually bidirectional, that is it can take Ethernet out to the wireless network or wireless network out to Ethernet). Most wireless routers have integrated access points (AP's), the Linksys WRT54G has an integrated AP).

Of the various standards, 802.11b was the first wireless communication standard to take off. It was followed by a superset of 802.11b, known as 802.11g. Both 802.11b and 802.11g use the same frequencies, and share many basic signaling features in common. However 802.11g has about 5 times the maximum speed as 802.11b. Generally when given a choice, always go for 802.11g over 802.11b there is no longer any real price advantage to going with 802.11b.

802.11b devices initially shipped with a weak and broken security method called WEP, this was replaced by WPA. Some 802.11b and some 802.11g devices do not support WPA even today. Avoid anything which doesn't support WPA, WPA is a superior security method to WEP by almost any measure. The Linksys WRT54G supports WPA and WEP, WPA is always preferred where possible.


Discussion of the WRT54G

The Linksys WRT54G router is for moderate use by families and small home offices. It provides basic NAT functionality, offers a connection to the cable modem (labeled WAN on the linksys) and connection for up to 4 local (LAN) devices (on any of 4 Ethernet "ports").

Currently as of this writing there are 3 versions of the WRT54G, they are version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0. Each reflect on a greater integration of the internal chipsets, the last (version 2.0) offers a significantly faster processor (clocked at 200Mhz vs. 125Mhz in versions 1.0 & 1.1). While the 2.0 version has lost some status indicator lights, the greater speed of the processor makes it easier for the unit to do more tasks with fewer problems. It is a good idea to purchase a 2.0 version if you at all can. Some 2.0 versions are contained in 1.1 boxes. Look for ver 2.0 on the router itself to determine if it is indeed a version 2.0 WRT54G.

The WRT54G is easily set up, it has a built in web server at LAN address 192.168.1.1, pointing your browser there and entering default password Admin will get you in permitting customization of the router.

The WRT54G works nicely with 802.11b and 802.11g only networks as well as mixed networks. It also permits 4 wired devices to be connected simply by plugging them in.

After install, it's a good idea to upgrade the firmware, this can be cone by a visit to Linksys (http://www.linksys.com).

You will discover on visiting the Linksys website, that the operating system the WRT54G uses is based on Linux, and honoring the GPL (an open source license) the source code and configuration files to the router are available for download and customization. We can thank both the user who discovered Linux was embedded in this router, and Cisco for respecting not only the letter of the GPL, but the spirit. In this regard Cisco has helped Linksys excel itself, and allowed users unprecidented ability to understand their product, fix bugs, and enhance it.

On the dslreport Linksys forum, you may notice several (last count I did was 3 current of maybe 5 attempts at a customized operating system for the Linksys WRT54G) customized versions of the Linksys WRT54G's software. Each has pro's and con's which are beyond the scope of this review, once you have your router, study the groups and make a decision for yourself :-)

I will add one secret / hint, I have used the Wi-Fi (a user handle on the dslreports forum) modified WRT54G firmware to modify the output power of my Linksys router, then reverted to vanilla linksys firmware. The higher power output remains in force despite moving back to the vanilla Linksys firmware. This improves range, but keeps me running Linksys approved firmware.