Cisco-Linksys Wireless-G Cable Gateway (WCG200)

I found this router easy to install and use, although the instructions could be misleading for the less experienced. It took Comcast far longer to set up thier part than it did for me to set up mine. This unit replaced a Linksys wireless-G router (WRT54G) and an older Motorola cable modem that was constantly dropping my connection in the middle of a download. I've had no such problem with the new setup. I've had this model running for over two weeks and the modem has not dropped its connection or reset once, contrary to some of the other reviews I've read. The security features are an improvement over my old WRT54G and the ability to turn off the broadcast of your SSID is a very welcome addition. The wireless range is good with the stock antenna, and mine is located inside a 19 inch steel equipment rack in the farthest back corner of my house. I purchased the high-gain antenna kit and antenna stand, which allows me to set the antenna outside of the rack up to 6 feet away from the router, but I have not installed them so far. Note that you will lose some signal strength from the six foot antenna stand cable and connectors, but a net gain in signal strength can be achieved by better antenna placement. (In my case this means outside of the steel rack.) Also this device uses SMA antenna connectors, not the TNA connector that Amazon suggests under the "Better Together" section at the time of this writing. Based on my experience with this product so far, I would very much recommend it.

This product serves its purpose. It's not out of this world, but usable. The real negative is it drops unexpectedly every now and then, but I find if I turn it off and back on once a day or so, it helps. Range is decent for the price. Easy to setup and enable some security to prevent my neighbors from "borrowing" my wireless connection.

i have been using the wcg200 v2 for just under 2 1/2 years now. i find it easy to configure, stable, and a great value. i didn't want to mess with seperate router, modem, and switch power packs and the stack of boxes and this unit consolidated all of them. i have comcast cable and have only had to power cycle the unit a few times each year, not much at all say maybe 3-4 times and it was as easy as removing the power cable going into the unit, waiting a few seconds and plugging it back in. i suspect the need for power cycling of the unit was due not to the stability of this unit but rather changes and downtime on comcast's side. i have two minor issues with the wcg200. first, the wcg200 uses firmware that is not flashable (you can't upgrade it) and linksys provides no firmware updates for the unit. second, this is a really minor one but would have been nice to have this feature working, it is the System Up Time field under the status section on the main web page for the wcg200. The problem is that after 8 hours of uptime the unit resets the uptime to zero hours and begins counting again up to the 8 hour mark before reseting the counter again. This means it is impossible to track how many days or months the unit has been up for. note also that any dropped connections are not always the result of the wcg200 unit but rather the wifi nic in the client systems. for example, for a long time i thought the wcg200 was causing my pc to loose wireless connectivity to the wcg200 and would power cycle the unit to fix the problem. however, over time i discovered it wasn't the wcg200 but rather the wifi network card i use. i use the linksys WUSB54G wifi adapter / NIC and it is responsible for frequently dropping the connection to the wcg200. i am now looking to replace the WUSB54G adapter with a Hawking HWU8DD adapter to solve this problem. so for anyone saying the wcg200 is no good, then check into the wireless adapter you are using with your pc as well as the reliability of your ISP before trashing the wcg200. *** UPDATE 10/24/2008 - I have noticed that my disconnects with wcg200 gateway is always wireless disconnects while the wired connections to other PC always remains accessible and functioning. The problem I have identified is isolated to the wireless aspect of this gateway. Furthermore, the disconnects appear to be directly related to the number of open TCP connections established and large amounts of download/upload data over the wireless connection. *** UPDATE 11/2010 - This gateway is still functioning (albeit with a gateway reboot every day or every couple of days). I have grown tired of my wireless connection dropping out while using this gateway and having to restart the gateway each time this happens. The wireless connectivity on this router stops functioning and is directly related to the amount of traffic processed. Don't expect to be able to watch YouTube videos with this gateway as after several hours of YouTube video downloading it will usually require another restart to restablish wireless connectivity. I had finally had enough and broke down to invest in replacement equipment. I switched over to the Linksys CM100 cable modem and Linksys WRT54GL and installed third party firmware on the router. My wireless connection from PC to router is now extremely stable and I haven't had any disconnects or require any reboots since installing it about 2 weeks ago.

I saw Walker's comments and thought I was in the same boat. However, the problem seemed to be Comcast's. The modem could not get an IP address from Comcast. The router had no problem assigning an address to the PC. I also could access the modem via my browser. I could see that the WAN IP address was not being set. So I called Comcast. The comcast rep had no idea what the problem was. I called Linksys support. They were useless. (I think they were in India reading scripted answers.) After being instructed to reboot the modem (as if I needed to be told that), they told me to return the product. I was not convince the product was defective. So I called Comcast again and got another rep. He told me Comcast was having problems with the servers which provide the new customers with IP addresses. (Maybe the DHCP servers were down.) They were working on it for a couple of days but it was not working at that time. He told me to try again tomorrow. So I called the next day. This time the rep took my modem model number and MAC address. In a short time, I was on the Internet! This product works like a champ. The comcast service and the modem are very fast. I used to have DSL. The moral of the story is that if you are having problems with this product, it is likely that it is on the ISP side. Keep calling back until it is resolved. Each time you get a new engineer who may help you get connected. Since the problem was on the ISP side, I cannot complain too much about Linksys support. Maybe they could have solve other problems if the ISP was not having problems. (However, I think that they should have been able to give me some commands to probe the product, which may have been able to determine that the product was OK and the ISP needed to correct the problem. Alas, they didn't/couldn't do that. Rather they suggest to return the product.)

If you are like me, IP is still a bit of an unknown, so when tech folks start tossing around acronyms like "DOCSIS", I have to scram to Google to figure it all out. I have had several Linksys products in the past, and all of them have performed well. This one is no exception, and in fact it has fixed an obscure problem I was having. The problem was Vonage. I am an avid Vonage user and have been for several years. Call us crazy, but we like to vary the scenery, so we periodically bounce between homes in Georgia, Florida and the UK. Vonage is ideal, because I can take my 2 US lines and my UK line with me on 2 little plug-in boxes, the VoIP adapters. Problem was that I was having some issues with my US locations that were quite unusual. Most of you will never run into them, but there was some strange configuration between my Vonage lines, Comcast and my router that wasn't working quite up to par. Vonage, in their unimatable way, sent me to about 300 different technicians before someone suggested that I check the DOCSIS on my modem. Sure enough, my previous router was at 1.1, and they thought that upgrading to 2.0 would fix the problem. Who would have thought? In a nutshell, it did! Since installing these gateways, I have had no, nada, problems with my Vonage. And everything else seems to be working fine as well. (Of course I'm running DSL in the UK, so who knows what I have to do there?) The bottom line is that this seems to be a fine product. It fixed my problem with the added benefit of taking an extra box out of the picture. I know, single point of failure, and all that, but really - how often have you lost a gateway? And if you do, just come back to Amazon and order another one! David Brown The Savvy Traveler & ITapestry LLC

I normally don't like to write bad reviews; however, I'm compelled to do so for the Linksys WCG200 version 2 due to the chronic instability of the device. I'm truly sorry I bought this device and I'm frustrated at Linksys since they do not appear to be offering any firmware updates to fix the issues. Both my wife and I work from home, so device outages are readily apparent. We have a Comcast broadband connection that has proved reliable since we got it in 2001. Until we bought the WCG200 , we were using separate devices for the cable modem, router, and wireless functions and decided to upgrade to the WCG200 since it has all three functions integrated. Below is a list what I have observed in the last 4 months of using the WCG200. I've found several Internet posts that detail similar issues for other folks. There seems to be a correlation of these issues with Comcast users; however, that may not be conclusive since Comcast has such large market share. 1. Frequent crashing of the device when wireless users are connected. The device will often stop responding and require a reboot. When we're using its wireless capabilities this occurs several times per day. If we don't use the wireless, the crashes still occur; however, they are markedly less frequent. I've also noticed that changing the wireless security settings seems to change the frequency of crashes. The device would crash hourly when using WPA or WPA2 security. 2. The administration pages stop responding after the device has been running for some time (usually about a day or two). In this case, the unit will still process traffic; however, I must reboot it to get into the administration interface. 3. The administration pages (when working) sometimes stall for 30-60 seconds. 4. The modem log doesn't always work properly. I've cleared the log and had old entries come back after a reboot. To be fair, Linksys does make other devices that work better. I've been a Linksys customer for several years...while I've seen quality issues before they usually come out with a firmware upgrade to address them.

I recently purchased this cable gate way, it was all i was looking for ,acesspoint router cable modem all in one, the setup was easy ill recomend dont use the usb, us your network cable its much faster, to network and internet.gettin my network conected and my cable comcast internet concected took me 5 days non stop, the manual dont help you with nothing, the people in lynksys support dont know nothing, these people in comcast didn't know what the hell was going on, my modem was not being detected, i was all out of options but i didn't gived up, BASICALLY I WAS ON MY OWN, finally i called comcast and for the first time i came across to someone who was smart and knew what he was talking about but still he couldn;t help me, i gave them my serial number and mac adress but there was a problem with the cable gate way the built in firewall was stoping comcast from giving me my unique ip adress. well on the 5th day i was ready to return this product and cancel my cable internet when i went to the product setting page [...] make sure you turn of your fire wall, and select disable "NAT AND ROUTING, FOR THOSE WHO DONT KNOW NAT IS LIKE A FIRE WALL TO SO IF YOU DISABLE YOUR FIRE WALL THE NAT IS STILL ON SO YOU NEED TO DISABLE IT. AND WHEN I DID THAT MY MODEM WAS DETECTED I CALLED UP SOME GUY FROM COMCAST AND IN LESS THAN 5 MINUTES I WAS UP AND RUNNIN ON THE HIGH SPEED CABLE INTER NET. AFTER YOUR CONECTED TO THE INTERNET IT WILL HELP IF YOU ENABLE NAT AND ROUTING SO OTHER COMPUTERS IN YOUR NETWORK CAN ACESS THE INTERNET TOO. IM TELLING YOU I GOT THIS LAPTOP IN MY HOME NETWORK AND ITS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HOUSE, EVEN THOUGH THE SIGNAL STRENGHTH IS LOW THE INTERNET IS STILL SUPER FAST ILL RECOMEND GETTING A RANGE EXPANDER.

Previous to using this gateway, I had another Linksys router connected to a Motorola cable modem. After a couple of years, I began to have connection problems and was often forced to reset both of them, and eventually had to do this once a week. Tired of the cables and wires anyway, I decided to replace them with this model as it was on Comcast's approved list. It was very easy to connect and once I called Comcast and gave them the MAC address it was up and running. It didn't take long though to determine that there is an apparent firmware issue when using this model with Comcast service. Currently, some of the security and set-up functionality is disabled and Comcast will have rollback the firmware to enable these. Something I am not looking forward to calling them about strictly because of the difficulty working with their customer service in the past. Other than that though, it works great. I have three computers running on this without any problems (at least so far).