Product Description

The sleek Simultaneous Dual-N Band WRT610N Router sets a new standard for design, expanded bandwidth, and robust performance. It's the ideal router for all your current and future digital entertainment needs. Introducing Linksys EasyLink Advisor (LELA), the application that provides and easy way to setup, view, manage, and repair your network - it's like having a Linksys expert in your home helping you to get the most out of your home network! Install it, set it up, and let it work for you! Linksys EasyLink Advisor works in the background, watching over your network. It will alert you to new devices, potential problems, security breaches and updates. If a problem occurs LELA steps in with a wizard to guide you and solve problems fast. It's so advanced, it's simple!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #356 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Linksys
• Model: WRT610N
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 10.04" h x 12.05" w x 2.60" l, 4.00 pounds

Features

• Internet-sharing Router and 4-port Gigabit Switch, with a built-in, dual-band, speed and range enhanced Wireless Access Point
• Two simultaneous, separate, radio bands double your available bandwidth
• MIMO technology uses multiple radios per band to create robust signals for maximum range and speed, with reduced dead spots
• Connect a hard drive or flash-based USB storage device to allow access to your music, video, or data files from within your network, or through the Internet

From the Manufacturer

The Dual-Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router is really four devices in one box. First, there's the dual-band Wireless Access Point, which lets you connect to the network without wires. There's also a built-in 4-port full-duplex 10/100/1000 Switch to connect your wired-Ethernet devices together at up to gigabit speeds. The Router function ties it all together and lets your whole network share a high-speed cable or DSL Internet connection.

We've also included a Storage Link that lets you easily add gigabytes of storage space onto your network using readily available USB 2.0 hard drives--or plug in a USB flash disk for a convenient way to access your portable data files. The built-in Media Server streams music, video, and photos from the attached storage device to any UPnP compatible media adapter. And you can get to your files from anywhere in the world through the Internet. The Access Point built into the Router uses a dual-band version of the very latest wireless networking technology, Wireless-N (draft 802.11n). By overlaying the signals of multiple radios for each band, Wireless-N's "Multiple In, Multiple Out" (MIMO) technology multiplies the effective data rate. Unlike ordinary wireless networking technologies that are confused by signal reflections, MIMO actually uses these reflections to increase the range and reduce "dead spots" in the wireless coverage area. The robust signals travel farther, maintaining wireless connections much farther than standard Wireless-G.

With Wireless-N, the farther away you are, the more speed advantage you get. It works great with standard Wireless-G, -A, and -B equipment, but when both ends of the wireless link are Wireless-N, the router can increase the throughput even more by using twice as much radio band, yielding speeds much faster than standard Wireless-G. But unlike other speed-enhanced technologies, Wireless-N can dynamically enable this double-speed mode for Wireless-N devices, while still connecting to other wireless devices at their respective fastest speeds. In congested areas, the "good neighbor" mode ensures that the Router checks for other wireless devices in the area before gobbling up the radio band.

Since the Router can operate in both the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz radio bands at the same time, it effectively doubles your available wireless bandwidth. For instance, you could set up your network to handle video streaming on one radio band, and use the other band for simultaneous data transfer--avoiding any interference or collisions that would degrade the video performance. To help protect your data and privacy, the Router can encode all wireless transmissions with industrial-strength 256-bit encryption. It can serve as your network's DHCP Server, has a powerful SPI firewall to protect your PCs against intruders and most known Internet attacks, and supports VPN pass-through. Configuration is a snap with the web browser-based configuration utility.

The incredible speed of Wireless-N and gigabit wired networking is ideal for media-centric applications like streaming video, gaming, and Voice over IP telephony, and gives you plenty of headroom to run multiple media-intense data streams through the network at the same time, with no degradation in performance. With the Linksys Wireless-N Storage Link Router at the center of your home or office network, you can easily add storage, share a high-speed Internet connection, files, printers and multi-player games, and run media-intensive applications at amazing speeds, without the hassle of stringing wires.

Customer Reviews

WT610N and DMA2200 tricky to setup
I had a problem with the first WRT610N that was shipped to me. After many hours on the chat line, and not being able to get the USB attached storage to appear on my network(Vista Home Premium), they sent me another new unit. That one worked extremely well and I've been using it for a week. I've even done a disk image backup of a portable over the `G' network to the USB attached drive. The Linksys support line is 866-509-7452 but I found the chat to be very good. Make sure you have your serial number as they will ask for that.
I primarily bought the unit to use with a Linksys DMA2200 Media Extender. That did not go well either but Linksys was very helpful over the phone and after many setting changes, that unit is also working very well. Settings on the router to make DMA2200 work include:
Basic Wireless - Set to Manual, Disable 5 GHz, Set 2.4 GHz Network Mode to Mixed, Set Radio Band to Wide, Set Wide Channel to 6, set Standard channel to 8
Set Wireless security to WPA2-Personal
Advanced Wireless Settings: (on both channels) Disable Frame Burst, Set Beacon Interval to 50, RTS Threshold to 2304
On the DMA2200, go to setting and reset to factory defaults under General Tab, walk through the setup screens. Then go to your PC and add the media Extender. Then power off the extender, Power off router for 1 minute. The power on router, Reboot PC, power on Extender and everything worked for me.
Once everything is working, you can go back to the router setup and enable the 5Ghz channel which now will work well with the media extender.

Works as described
This is a great product from Linksys. I followed the instructions about of the box, and it works as described. No dropped connections, no other problems.

Bad news
This thing has version 1.00 firmware in it and it shows. It was slower than my wireless G modem it was to replace. All of our wireless devices took forever to load a web page--both Windows XP and Mac OS X computers. We had great response with the previous LinkSys router that it was to replace. After Googling and looking at the LinkSys web site for answers, I returned it after one day. I am back on my old, reliable router w/o a worry.

Save yourself the money and grief and stay away from this thing.