Linksys Wireless-G ADSL Gateway WAG54G - wireless router

...search I decided on the Linksys WAG54G which combined a modem, a router, a 4 port network switch along with the wireless capabilities. I bought it off Amazon for £72 delivered and it turned up the very same day as our Broadband was switched on.

It is a smart blue and grey box with one antenna sticking out from the back, it has a power adapter, a length of cable to initially connect to a PC to set it up, a micro filter which is used ...
...wanted to know about the Linksys 54g unit and how it performs.....
So here we go then.

Setup is very easy, in fact far easier than the scant paperwork which comes with the unit would suggest, I have the unit in an upstairs room connected to the phone line and coverage is available all round the house...and no, I didn't lug a PC from room to room to find out, I borrowed a friends laptop and walked around looking at the signal ... more

Since we aquired another PC a while ago, it was always on my mind to "network" them together so that I could use printer and internet connection between the pair of them. Initially I had a stab at hard wiring them together using "CAT 5" cable and 2 ethernet cards, (well they both had them in anyway so that wasn't a cost, the first problem I had transpired that the wires had to be "crossover" CAT 5 cables and mine weren't so that was another unexpected small expense.

However, they did work and I was able to do all the things I wanted to do and learned a great deal about basic networking along the way. However, my wife was not so pleased at having bright orange cable running from one end of the house to the other dispite my best efforts to conceal them.
Needless to say I capitulated and disconnected my system and went back to using the one PC whilst the other just gathered dust.

Now it happened that my son appeared at the door one day with yet another PC which his friend had given him for free, so we set it up in his room, and after some cheap minor upgrades it worked quite well.

The question soon arose about the possibility of him having internet access (for school work etc etc), Once again inspired into action I headed to the loft to root out the cables, but one withering look from my dear wife as I came down the loft ladder clutching the bag of orange cables was enough warning to head straight back up again and put them back into the box from where they came!

So with the cabling idea a definite non-starter, my son suggested wireless connections instead, however, the equipment was a bit on the pricey side for us to go straight out and buy in one go, so over the next week, we bidded on ebay and eventually got 3 wireless cards, one "actiontec", and 2 "3-com" cards.
We installed them into the PC's with no problems and used internet wireless conection wizard to do the actual configuring, our part being just to insert and take out a floppy disk here and there.

So now we had 3 PC's, all being able to share each others files and the printer, as well as being able to access the internet. The downside of this was the phone line being permanantley tied up with someone or another on line.

The answer was Broadband, I looked around for the best and cheapest ISP's and eventually settled on Prodigy networks for £15 per month for 2 meg speed downloads and a 2 gig usage cap. As we were wireless already and had to buy a ADSL modem I figured why not buy a wireless one so I could move the PC away from the phone point, after another exhaustive search I decided on the Linksys WAG54G which combined a modem, a router, a 4 port network switch along with the wireless capabilities. I bought it off Amazon for £72 delivered and it turned up the very same day as our Broadband was switched on.

It is a smart blue and grey box with one antenna sticking out from the back, it has a power adapter, a length of cable to initially connect to a PC to set it up, a micro filter which is used to seperate the phone line from ADSL noise. It also comes with a disk which is not a driver disk (it comes pre-configured so does not need drivers installing onto the PC's), the disk contains a user manual, a copy of Adobe to read the manual with if you don't already have it installed and a 2 month free trial to Norton security.

Now, before you connect everything up, you need to use your modem one last time to connect to your broadband ISP and get the all important connection settings, print or write them down (you may have them emailed to you already but of course this depends on how your ISP works).

To set up, you connect the ethernet cable between the unit and the PC, you connect the adsl cable to the micro filter splitter and then you switch everything on. You open your internet browser and select "tools/internet options/connections" and select "never dial my a connection". This stops the browser from trying to use the modem.

So with this done, you then type in http://192.168.1.1 which is the units IP address, you will then get a security box come up asking for a generic username and a password, check the paperwork for this. (but it needs changing when you are all set up of course).
Once in, you find yourself in a smart control panel in the "basic setup" section. You need to carefully follow the instructions supplied and fill in the blanks with the information from your ISP, it really isn't difficult at all, in fact, you only really need to input about 4 items of info in most cases for everthing to be ready to work. Click save settings. Now, if you are using wireless it really would pay to put some degree of security up as the unit comes with none set by default. Go into wireless security settings and assign a level of security you require, choose at least WEP 64 bit.
When you do this you need to enter a password, once entered it transferres this into a string of numbers which you need to copy precisely into the security settings on the other PC's on the network so that they and only they can speak to each other and use the facilities, you really don't want next door to be able to evesdrop your files or use your bandwith unless you can come to an agreement on helping to pay for the service, (hmmm, there's an idea). You need also to make sure you set the connection to either always on or dial when required depending on your broadband package. You can now disconnect the wire connecting the PC and the unit and just go wireless......and yes it works!!!

So now the moment of truth, you have set up and saved the settings and you watch the red light (which stands for connected or not to the internet) on the front of the unit turn to green, you are now connected.
YIPEE.

The unit has it's own built in firewall so I had turned off Windows one, when I turned it back on again it still worked fine so I left it on as a second line of defence.

So you can now connect to the internet at a much faster rate than previously available, downlaods are very much quicker indeed. But hang on a minute, thats all very well you might say, but we wanted to know about the Linksys 54g unit and how it performs.....
So here we go then.

Setup is very easy, in fact far easier than the scant paperwork which comes with the unit would suggest, I have the unit in an upstairs room connected to the phone line and coverage is available all round the house...and no, I didn't lug a PC from room to room to find out, I borrowed a friends laptop and walked around looking at the signal strength. I had full strenght everywhere except in one part of the kitched for some reason where I had no signal at all which was very strange, but as I don't intend to have a PC sitting on top of the washing machine I don't think I'll worry, I can even get it at a reasonable strength half way down the garden, but again, until (oops, I mean unless) I get a lap top that option won't be used.

There seems to be quite a lot of issues raised in various forums regarding connection drops and the like, well, although I don't leave the unit switched on all the time I have yet to witness this event as connection had been 100% all the time?? Perhaps it might happen if you use a mix of wired and wireless connections but as mine are all wireless I seem imune.

The unit does get very warm however and needs to be kept well ventillated, some do say that it works better on it's side but I have not tried this out. Also, if you have one of those units which transmits your satilite / freeview from one room to another, they all work on the same wave length so you might find some conflicts there even though you can manually change the channels they send on to try to prevent this.

Would I reccomend this unit to a friend? Yes I would. I have not yet had to contact customer support so I have rated their service as satisfactory although others have said that they are unhelpfull. 

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