Linksys (or Cisco)–how about fixing sites?

Ok, recently I upgraded my home DSL (10Mbit at best) connection to FTTH. Yes, I’ve joined the leading army of Lithuanian FTTH users and I have fiber cable in my room. I must say 100Mbit (40Mbit abroad) – that’s something I love. I have to mention that I’m planning to upgrade to 200Mbit service this year, because 2x increase in speed will increase spending only by 25% and will be something ~29Eur/month, which is fairly reasonable for me.

As I’ve got the FTTH, I needed to change the router. As I’m planning to upgrade later to 200Mbit plan, so I’ve decided not to invest in a heavy-weight router now and decided to buy something of the shelf. I found pretty cheap and already fairly old model Linksys WRT160Nv2 and bought it. As I’m used to Linksys routers – so the setup was fast and initially everything seemed to be ok, except the speed reduction (which was expected, ‘cause this particular router can make at best 80Mbit according the tests).

However the bad things started, when connected everything to that router: work laptop, home laptop, netbook, home server and xbox – the router started loosing packets, time-out with DNS requests, etc. – in other words bad things started to happen. It was obvious – a router fault. Looking at the firmware – the obvious thing pops right into eyes – 2 years old firmware, probably crappy one.

And here it comes – I went to the linksys.com support site to look for the newer firmware, selected model (WRT160N version 2), etc. and what I’ve got? The same old firmware. That can’t be true. I’ve started binging the internet and landed into bunch of forums (including the ones from Cisco), which just confirmed what I’ve seen – a faulty firmware and that linksys/cisco were not very much helpful about solving the issue for whatever reasons. What else I’ve seen on those that there were other versions of firmware, but the links were pointing to some “not very trustworth sites” until I’ve found a link to a cisco site for home users. Yes, that one contained updated version of firmware, which seems to be working ok for now.

You may ask, so what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that after the cisco bought linksys – they kept the site dead (content not updated), but alive (still there and even has Cisco logo). In many cases for the product support I type <.com> and in this case it just plainly #fail.

Dear Cisco, please either kill the linksys.com and redirect it to the appropriate cisco site or update the content accordingly.