Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A real answer to a real problem
I am not sure what all the others had problems with but my Linksys worked great out of the box. Setting it up I had an issue that was easily fixed by calling tech support,(only 5 min wait and worth it, the technician was very good). My laptop which will be connecting wirelessly was not connecting no matter what I tried. It turns out that you can't run wireless cards and ethernet cards (mine was built in} at the same time because the machine will always default to the ethernet card. Which is exactly what was happening. We removed the driver for the ethernet card and it began to work great right away. Everything else about the setup was fairly simple and went very smooth the directions were easy to understand. I especially liked the quick installation sheet which is what I used to setup with.I highly recommend this product and would buy it again if I had to do it all over. The distance of the wireless machine is really dependent on terrain. But for my two story house it was great. The only weak spot being downstairs in the opposite direction of the linksys base as far as I could go. However it still worked and was quite able to handle downloads even at the weakest point. You just can't go wrong till they come out with a new beakthrough in technology. But even then the prices will be to high in the beginning. For instance the new 802.11a is several hundred dollars more expensive then this machine. And for what you get I just don't need it. This is a winner. The newest version of the product is BEF11S4 VER 2. Many of the reviews done in this section were about the
BEF11S4 its the same model number but lacking the ver.2 after the BEF11S4. The newest version has fixed most of the bugs of the previous version. Good Luck!!! A very satisfied consumer
Rating: - Impressive
This unit accomodates both hard wired networks (up to 4 devices) and wireless networks (use the Linksys cards - others may not be compatible) and serves as a router and access point. Setting it up was incredibly simple (I updated the firmware right away) and the default settings worked perfectly with my cable (Road Runner) ISP. I did implement MAC cloning on advice from the Linksys website (a great source for info on configuring this for various DSL/cable ISPs) later just in case. This was easy with the web-based configuration software.You do have to know how your ISP works. I'm assuming I could not disable DHCP because Road Runner uses it. Since I couldn't give my machines static IP addresses, I sometimes have to change the port forwarding configurations depending on which IP address the router assigns each machine (we turn off the machines at night). You also need to reconfigure some of your internet software to work behind a firewall if they haven't been set that way all ready. And in some cases, I had to disable my personal firewalls (we use Sygate, AtGuard or Zone Alarm) for internet software to work (particularly FTP clients). The wireless range (we have 3 hard wired computers and a couple of wireless laptops) is not spectacular (50' radius) but adequate for our purposes. Would have appreciated some input from the manufacturer about effective placement of the unit for optimal wireless performance. If you're willing to do a little tweaking now and then and don't need extensive wireless range, this is a great all-purpose device.
Rating:  - A nightmare
I had used the wired-only version of this box successfully for about two years. I thought I'd give this one a try. What a mistake.If you use CAT5 wiring, it works like a dream. If you use a wireless adapter, forget it. There are several 'file not found' errors in the web-based administration of the FIRMWARE. Wireless clients show strong signal strength connecting to the box, and indeed the box's 'wireless lan link' light is lit. However, the box refused to provide DHCP service to any wireless clients. For the record, I was using a D-Link DWL-120 and a Lucent Orinoco Gold on two different machines in my attempts to get an IP address. D-Link and Orinoco blamed Linksys. Linksys blamed D-Link and Orinoco. Linksys is clearly at fault, judging from the many message board postings that I've seen online. There are a bunch of wireless routers out there. Save yourself the aggrivation of returning an item. I thought that by sticking with the 'Linksys' name, I'd get a working piece of hardware. I was way wrong.
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