Friday, December 7, 2007

Cisco, whatever happened to product testing?

I just got off the phone from a relative who has a problem with her Linksys WAG54GS wireless router which keeps dropping connection and resets itself. Now I have created a temporary backup file for her to restore the settings any time the fucking thing decides to hard reset itself, but this has been going on a weekly basis for months now ever since her I.T. friend brought it in. He also uses the same router and has no problem with it and even exchanged his for hers when the problem started popping up.

At first my gut feeling tells me that the fault likes with the ISP, UKOnline (they are known to be awful, if not cheap). Even then I am sure no matter how awful an ISP is it wouldn't erase settings from a modem. I will probably try to do a firmware upgrade next week but right now every week I get a phone call from her regarding the issue I want to tell her to bin the bloody router. Someone else who owns the same product confirmed to me that this particular Linksys model had issues with keeping its settings and downloading the latest firmware will rectify it, which I confirmed via Googling. So hopefully once I apply the new firmware this crap product will work as advertised.

Personally I should count myself lucky. Of all the negative things being said about Belkin wireless routers and Virgin Media/NTL, we have been online for 3 months now and only experienced a handful of drop-outs (like once a month) and never was it the fault of the router. And to think we almost bought a Linksys because it "looks nice". With the Belkin, never once was I forced to break out the manual from storage. Hell Virgin has never even throttled our connection despite super heavy usage.

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