Linksys WAG325N Hardware Problems

A follow-up to my earlier post about problems with the Linksys WAG325N ADSL modem device – after going through a couple of hours of Live Chat with the Linksys team, they have finally admitted defeat and asked me to send it back in, as it seems a hardware fault is responsible for at least the 10mbit fallback problem.

Several other users are still reporting the problems; some have also sent theirs back only to get another faulty unit and have to send it back again – so hopefully at some point in the process we’ll end up getting working units.

I am hoping there’s just a bad batch of these things out there and it’s a relatively simple hardware fault that can be magically fixed. This is my first time buying Linksys hardware so needless to say I’m a little disappointed; I’m especially not looking forward to sending this back and being without a modem/switch/wifi device for the duration.

Linksys WAG325N bugs

I bought a Linksys WAG325N a month or so ago, after using a borrowed one for a while and thinking it was pretty good. Aside from the fact that I bought it brand new from Harvey Norman and it had clearly already been used (someone else had already set it up in the admin panel), it works pretty well except for two bugs that are present in the latest firmware (v1.00.11) – one of which I would call ‘critical’.

The two bugs have been documented on their forums:

1) Ethernet ports intermittently fall back to 10mbit mode, requiring a restart of the modem
2) Windows Mobile wireless devices cannot connect.

Both of these problems disappear if you roll back to a previous revision of the firmware (I’m using 1.00.06).