In today’s post I would like to share my experience with the Linksys WRT54GX ver2 router. Granted it is based on 802.11G MIMO technology which has been superceded by Draft N technology, it does have some excellent points which make it a strong contender and the subject of this post.

I have experimented with a few Draft-N wireless routers from Level One and Belkin and have discovered they stop short of delivering the promised range on the box especially in multi-storey houses and buildings.

The Linksys WRT54GX on the other hand is able to broadcast a strong signal through several concrete walls despite being placed in less-than-perfect locations, such as below staircases and nooks and corners.

This router has given me excellent service all these years, with hardly any need for power-cycling or resetting, while being paired with a simple TMNet Billion modem. So recently when this router began giving me some trouble I immediately took a trip to Low Yat to purchase a new unit of this exact model, given its reliability in the past. My trip turned out to be a disappointment when I found out this model had been discontinued and replaced with N routers. Given my not-so-fantastic experience with Level One and Belkin N routers, I decided to give the Linksys N routers a skip and went home and decided to perform a thorough examination of the router to determine what was wrong.

Upon further checking, I discovered the router was working well when I connected to it through a wired connection, but the wireless portion was not working altogether. In fact, it was worse, the status screen on the web interface indicated there was no wireless module installed at all. The wireless light on the router failed to come on as well. I decided to upgrade the firmware to version 2.00.20 and it was still the same. Every setting seemed correct and I was beginning to wonder if the wireless module had malfunctioned.

That’s when I performed a search on Google for “WRT54GX wireless MAC missing”. It is amazing what the correct keywords can do for a query. It can really mean a world of difference between getting the results you need and sifting through pages after pages of irrelevant results.

Anyway, the search results lead me to this page on the Linksys forums which was a post by hameluck from the United States with the exact same problem I was facing!

The best part was that he had discovered a solution to the problem, and the reason why the wireless module was not working was that the wireless daughter card in the modem had become loose from its connector. Without wasting anytime, I unscrewed the device and sure enough I saw that the wireless card had become loose from its connector. I pushed it back in, powered the router back on and voila! the wireless module was functional again.

As mentioned above, the router is placed below a staircase and despite all the concrete, it is still able to send a strong signal across an entire double storey house, right up to the very corners of the house. Despite all the marketing hype, I have yet to see an 802.11n router perform as well as this router can.