Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Like many of you, I find it very difficult to get clear information on networking products on-line. Unlike other electronic devices, it seems that there are a ton of bozos out there all weighing in on how horrid their router is, when either they don't know what they're doing or they have physicial challenges that aren't the hardware's fault. Suffice it to say that I did a ton of research before buying this product. As it turned out, Amazon has the best price (inclusive of shipping, of course) - but I checked out the reviews on CNET, NewEgg, and anywhere else I could find information. The best resouce I found was here - at SmallNetBuilder.com. [...] This guy really puts the devices through their paces and seems to be relatively unbiased in his approach. I tip my hat to him. This product is fast and relatively easy to set up. Most importantly it has TWO radios. What this means to you is that you will see TWO different versions of the router when it is on-line. If you'd like you can dedicate one of the channels for N and one for B/G. This is all laid out very clearly on the Linksys product website, should you wish to check that out. You'll see many products that say "Dual Band" (it can operate in both frequencies) but be careful because unless the product says "Simultaneous transmission" it will not do so at the same time. So if you have, like we do in my house, N users and G users, and you want different security or other settings on the various channels Simultaneous Transmission is the way to go. There may be other reasons to go this route including Media streaming or gaming on the 5 ghz band - this is particularly true if you simply want to eliminate wires and aren't trying to stream your N/5 GHz signal very far. If you have realistic expectations of what this product will do - and especially if you don't need a Gigabit ethernet connection on your network (I have a Gigabit switch for my wired boxes, which means that transfers to those machines get 'slowed down' to 100 GHz when they are interfacing with the wireless world, but from a practical perspective I haven't noticed any slowing!) this is, by far, the wireless router to get. I'm not going to argue with the folks who say that they don't see a speed improvement, but I can tell you that we see speed improvements on both the N spectrum and the G spectrum relative to our old Belkin pre-N router. Finally, the design looks funky in pictures and in the videos that I saw. In the home it's pretty swank looking and certainly less noticable relative to something with exterior antenae. So another tip of the cap to the designers. Overall I'm very impressed with this device and pleased to give it 5 stars!