Linksys SRX Review

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The Linksys SRX ( Speed and Range eXpansion ) router has earnt its place in our apartment and office simply because it outperformed the rest of the Linksys routers we have been going through. Some background. Our apartment and office both have unusual walls — enforced with a lot of steel, which act as Faraday cages and seriously limit the range of the routers. In addition to the range issue, we have had problems with over-crowding of channels. This router allowed us to overcome both the factors with its additional antenna (and circuitry) and the auto-channel selection feature which automatically selects less crowded channels.

We had tried to extend the functionality of the WRT54G with an external antenna / booster, but gave up and selected the SRX. Now, we agree that our selection was subjective — we did not use any monitoring or calibration equipment to scientifically determine that this was the best router — we just plugged it in and it worked a whole lot better.Like all Linksys routers, make sure that you have upgraded the firmware to the latest available. Most of the stock firmware in Linksys routers is old and frequently found problems are fixed with the latest upgrades.Essential features of this router that we use.

• SPI Firewall : We have found the firewall fairly competant and it our software based firewalls have not been triggered by any unusual activity from the outside / public networks that the router is connected to.
• WPA / WEP security: Again, the security is adequate for most home and SOHO usage.
• MAC Filtering: Once the local computers have authenticated with the router, we turned on the MAC filtering. This feature limits the connecting devices by their physical address (each network card or adaptor has a fixed and unique address built in) and limits the cards that can have access to our network. An essential security feature in our opinion.

Things to keep in mind.

• Speed: The main limiting factor is your ISP’s connection speed. If your connection speed to the internet is limited by the ISP at “3 mbps” for example, your connection to the outside world will not be any faster than 3mbps. Your internal connections will operate close to the advertised speeds. One of our most remote computers operates at close 11mbps and the computer connected directly to the router (wired connection) operates at close to 100mbps. Average performance is in the 20-40mbps range across our network.
• Setup: PLEASE follow the documentation provided. We have come across so many reviews which complain about the setup or problems with the router, which were fixed simply by resetting the device back to its factory settings and configuring it by following the suggested steps in the docs.
• Network Key: Save this network key on a floppy or USB key. It is simply way too long to remember.
• Change the default password: The default password on all linksys devices is “admin” and will cause security issues if you do not change this password.

While this router is more expensive than the WRT54G series, it has outperformed the rest of the Linksys gear that we have bought over the last several years and comes highly recommended.