Dear Linksys: Your broken WET54GS5 makes me sad.

Mon Apr 11 17:51:45 UTC 2005

Dear Support staff at Linksys:

This weekend I made a futile attempt to enable WPA Pre-Shared Key 
mode on my home wireless network. The network consists of a 
Linksys WRT54G router, two WET54GS5 bridges, and a pair of Apple 
iBooks running MacOS X.

The iBooks had no problem communicating with the WRT54G in WEP PSK 
mode. As soon as I made the configuration changes on the router and 
the laptops, the link was up and consistent.

I had no such success with the pair of WET54GS5 bridges. They would 
report WPA initialization succes, and pass traffic for several 
minutes. They would then mysteriously drop link and cease passing 
traffic. The only way to bring the link back up was to 
"re-authenticate" via the WET55GS5 web interface.

I spent quite a long time making sure the bridges were seeing 
adequate signal, and double-checking configurations everywhere. In 
frustration, I googled to see if other folks had seen the problem:

http://www.google.com/search?q=linksys+wet54gs5+wpa+psk

It seems to me that not a single customer of yours who has purchased 
your WET54GS5 has been able to use WPA PSK mode. I'd like to point 
out that WPA is advertised as a supported feature on the packaging.

This has been a known defect since the product was first offered for 
sale. The latest firmware (which does not fix the problem!) for the 
device was released ONE YEAR AGO, in April of 2004.

I spoke online with a helpful support person, who let me know that 
Linksys is indeed aware of the problem, but does not intend to do 
anything about it. This is dissapointing, and reflects very poorly 
on your new parent company.

Do you plan on remedying the problem before a class-action lawsuit 
is organized?

thank you,
Matt Ghali
Your former customer

--matt at snark.net------------------------------------------<darwin><
               The only thing necessary for the triumph
               of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke