One thing that’s not cool is when companies like Linksys sell you wireless networking hardware that costs a lot of money with next to no documentation to support the product. The closest thing you get is a huge 6-foot poster thingy, with lots of beautiful photographs and absolutely no useful information. What do they think i’m gonna do with it, hang it on my wall? Then you go to the website and it’s impossible to navigate, and all you see are catchy slogans all over the place, talking about how easy it is to setup your wireless home network.

I know that Linksys uses Cisco parts so that’s good. I also found their wireless products to have really good range, as compared to similar products by Netgear, D-Link, MSI, GVC. I had put together a number of different wireless networks solutions for people using a Linksys WRT54G wireless router, PCMCIA and PCI cards, but many of them wanted to extend their networks either upstairs, downstairs, into the backyard, you name it.

So i did some research and came up with the Linksys WRE54G Wireless Range Extended. Also known as a “repeater”, the WRE54G has been around for a while and is supposed to let you increase the range of your network past the average 100FT max. Theoretically, you could double that distance but throughput (your bandwidth) is cut in half with every hop. So basically, with every range extender you add, speed (in this case) goes from 54 Mbps to 27 Mbps to 13.5, and so on. What’s great about it though, is that unlike a wireless bridge or access point, the range extender doesn’t actually plug into you LAN directly. That means no need to run ethernet cable from the router to the device, just plug it into the wall outlet for power and your good to go.

Anyway, i got the WRE54G because it was also a Linksys product, same manufacturer as the rest of the equipment, and hoped this would ensure compatibility, maximum performance and stability. Let me tell you – i was wrong. First of all, i haven’t seen much stability in the way of wireless networks in general. What i have seen is: 2 wireless “g” products from different manufacturers, that should work fine together, but don’t. So from now on, i try to go with all components from the same manufacturer. Second, i later found out that the WRE54G only works with 2 other Linksys products: the WRT54G and WRT54GS wireless routers (so much for maximum compatibility). Luckily, i had one of these – but come on, 2 other products..

The disk provided by Linksys takes you easily through the setup of the range extender. Ironically, this entire process is completely unnecessary as you can just plug in the WRE54G and connect to it directly without using the disk at all. In fact, you don’t even need to do anything at all; the default setup will normally do just fine until you get more comfortable with the whole thing. What they fail to tell you before you buy the WRE54G, is that it is completely useless and that it won’t work. Well, not right out of the box anyway, and not with the wireless router i had.

The main problem is (and this is a big one): that the range extender uses WDS (a bridging technology), and the wireless router doesn’t have this feature built in. very disturbing indeed. After hours of wondering why i could connect, but not get the internet – i decided it was time to hit the web a second time. i looked for troubleshooting and how-to pages and once again the Linksys site was no help. Frankly, at this point, i don’t know if i would believe them if they did offer some advice. i ended up on TomsNetworking.com, reading about how to manually setup the WRE54G with almost any other wireless router except the one i had. all you needed was a WDS capable device and as it turns out, the only way i was going to get my wireless Linksys router to play nice with his brother is by flashing the BIOS and installing firmware that has WDS functionality. i soon found out that Sveasoft Alchemy firmware is best for the job and thanks to phillippe [niquille.com], i was finally able to download it.

From that point on, everything else went pretty smoothly. i followed the relevant steps from the article on tomsnetworking.com and finally got the range extender to associate itself with the wireless router. Now i’ve got 2 big hotspots that i can connect to..

i’m exhausted just thinking about it.