Cisco-Linksys Refurbished E3000 High-Performance Wireless-N Router - E3000-RM / E3000RM (REFURBISHED BY LINKSYS / CISCO WITH A 90 DAY WARRANTY).

Before buying this router, I was skeptical reading other reviews, about Cisco's refurbish quality, and so on. However, I decided to take the risk, mostly due to the special price, just about 50% of the price of a brand-new product.One thing might make you dishearted. The product doesn't come in its traditional cisco-linksys shining packaging. Rather it comes in a brown box, with a big red sticker on it, which says that its a Cisco Linksys E3000 RM (Refurbished), and includes a grayscale photo of the product. However, though I got a little shake, but I would suggest you not to get dishearted. You are paying half of what you are supposed to pay.After opening the box, I found that the router looked like new, no scraths on it, rather contained the protective plastic sticker on it. Nothing to complain. I looked at the back, and found some french and english instructions. Seems that the router was initially sold in France .... hmmm..The package also contained ethernet cables, adapter, and a CD containing cisco's mumbo jumbo client softwares which I never use, and product manual. The CD is not the one that shipped with the product, rather it had a different label with "Cisco E3000 Refurbished" printed on it.I prepared to power the router on, and took the adapter. And here I got another little shake. The adapter is not from cisco -- its a third party adapter. I had a OpenWRT white russian modded WRT54GL, I just checked the adapter with that router. That was from linksys.... hmmm.. May be this product I received had problems with adapter, hence they suppplied me a 3rd party adapter. Whatever, I am happy as long as it works.I connected the router with my pc via the blue ethernet cable provided, went to the web administration page, and found that the page is written in French. Third shake. Whatever, I then reset the router, and found the english page. Rest of the process was pretty much great. I set up the Wireless-N for 2.4 GHz channel. The throughput was something like 17-20Mbps using my comcast connection. I then changed to 5 GHz for wireless LAN. And great !! Internet throughput then became 26-27 Mbps as it was. I haven't tested speed with local file transfers. 2.4 Ghz channel is pretty much busy around me as I always can find around 25-30 networks nearby.So I am using 5 GHz wireless N for my macbook pro. On the other hand, my Nokia E65 cell phone do not have a 5 GHz band and it doesn't know Wireless-N. Hence, for that purpose I've configured the 2.4 GHz band to use Wireless B/G only. And it works fine.I have connected my 160 GB USB disk with the router, and I am using it as a shared storage. I can watch movies stored in that hard disk. Its just fine. I've created ftp access, and thats also fine. Only thing to gruel is sftp and ssh is not there. But, hey, we have DD-WRT and Open-WRT :DBefore choosing a router I had E2000, E2500, E3000, and E3200 in mind. E2500 and E3200 has a temporary minus because DD-WRT is not available. Between E2000 and E3000, previously I was not sure if I really need a simultaneous dual-band router so E2. But now it seems, its perfectly necessary for me. If I had bought E2000, I would get gigabit lan ports, but not simultaneous dual band. In that case, I had to compromise speed in the pc and use only b/g, if I wanted to use internet from the phone.I have been using the router for more than 2 weeks, and I am satisfied. I would rate it 4 out of 5 due to the little shakes involved (3rd party adapter, white box, and default french language). However, as its a refurbished product, and considering its price, I give it a 5 out of 5.

I didn't try this router with the stock firmware, I immediately flashed DD-WRT then Tomato. It's only been running for an hour, but it's very fast. I'm getting transfer speeds around 17MB/s (vs. ~11MB/s with a Belkin N600 that was connected at 300Mbps). Gigabit ethernet works too (it didn't work on the Belkin).I attached a USB drive and mapped it on my Windows 7 computer. The connection seems robust, but speed is slow (~1.5MB/s - 2MB/s). Some quick research leads me to believe that you generally can't get fast connection speeds from the USB port on a router, but I"m not expert.The reason I only gave it 4 stars are:1. Slow USB transfer speeds2. Runs hot (I don't really care how hot it is, except I assume that means it uses more power)3. No option for 4.5 stars.

I bought this router to replace my refurbished linksys e2000 which is actually still working well for me. I just wanted to upgrade my home network to dual band with better coverage. I read about the overheating issue about this router on internet. But with my happy experience with e2000, I didn't expect it to be very serious. After intial setup and a brief test, the performance looked pretty good with better coverage and larger throughout. But the next day, when I tried to stream hd videos through 5g band wifi. The router started to reboot from time to time after 20 minute use. I realized that could be due to the overheating problem. Then I followed the advice from internet to raise it up for better ventilation. But it didn't help much. The bottom still ran very hot and kept rebooting after some time. Switched back to the old e2000 and sent this one back.

First of all - I had previously ordered a lower model linksys router which had been refurbished. When I received that item - it would only start with a blinking power light but never worked. That said, I was gun shy to try a second one but gave it a go. Fortunately this router worked flawlessly with no problems whatsoever. I really liked the fact the router had these specific features:1.) Dual simultaneous wireless radios2.) USB Port3.) Gigabit Ethernet LAN portsI was upgrading routers and, since we have more and more traffic on our LAN and internet connection in general, we were really starting to feel the pain of slow connections due to the fact we were basically maxing out the older hardware. The new hardware CPU is over twice as fast @ 480MHz and the memory is much improved to 64MB. At present, we have more than 76% memory free on the router and our average CPU utilization is less than 10%. So in other words - the router hardware isn't even breaking a sweat under our normal heavy network load.Internet browsing is noticeably faster despite multiple users streaming movies, music and downloading files.Although the router has a setup CD to assist non-technical users on first time configuration, I used the standard web interface and replaced the Linksys / Cisco firmware with DD-WRT. The upgrade was easily done and opens up many more configuration options for the hardware. My previous router was also running DD-WRT, however, this version includes additional features specific to the hardware. (i.e. USB port, dual wireless radios, etc.) I used the stock firmware for a brief time and felt is was more than adequate for any user, however, since we utilize VPN to securely connect to our home network from outside locations, changing to DD-WRT was a must.Overall I'm extremely pleased with this router and the performance has met, if not exceeded, my expectations.