Review: Linksys E3000 is buggy

I recently purchased a new home router, the Cisco Linksys E3000, in order to add support at home for 802.11n at 5Ghz. What attracted me to the E3000 was the dual-band radio (both 2.4Gz and 5Ghz) and other reviews pointing out its excellent wireless speed and coverage. Plus it was on sale for $140.

Indeed the wireless radios in the unit are awesome. But after using it a few weeks, I do not recommend it. The main problem is it apparently has a memory leak or some such, as firewall throughput slows down progressively over a period of days. I observe incoming internet throughput routinely drop over 5 days from 5.2Mb/sec to 2.0Mb/sec - after rebooting the router, it immediately goes back to 5.2Mb/sec (the speed of my DSL connection). I tried upgrading the firmware to the latest version released August 2010 - no improvement. Some others on the Cisco forums have reported similar findings, and suggested the culprit was UPnP. I tried disabling UPnP, but that did not make the internet throughput problem go away. Bummer.

On the plus side, the wireless radio(s) are very fast and have very good coverage, the USB port for supporting network attached storage is a nifty feature (although it seems a bit slow for HDTV content), and support for the new 5Ghz and older 2.4Ghz standards at the same time is nice. If you don't mind power cycling your router every few days until Cisco fixes the bug (if they ever do), then the Linksys E3000 is great. Personally, I find having to reboot my router every few days to get decent internet throughput very annoying.