Christoff knew the dangers, but he went ahead anyway. He bought a Linksys router. And lo, it broke. The day had come for him to deal with their outsourced tech support. Over four hours of conversation and hold time, mainly hold time, later, he has a 2nd replacement router. Both replacement routers had the same problem as the first. Read of his trials and tribulations, inside…

So, after years of hearing how bad linksys and their outsourced tech support is, I actually finally had to deal with it. Lets start this by saying I’ve got a good amount of years in the IT Field it is still the line of work I am in. This is the story of Linksys support yielding ZERO results. (the attached two images are screenshots on my phone of only the calls with linksys)

A few weeks back (Monday, may 9th), I decided to use the chat support on the Linksys site due to an issue I had with my WRT310N router, basically if set to Wide Band (40mhz) it would drop my Wireless N speeds to 1mbps as opposed to the 270mbps that wide band is supposed to allow, so I spoke with Kate B. (29800) [according to the logs they emailed ],
we went through troubleshooting and determined that it was a definite issue with the router, so we went through the
RMA process, skip forward a week to Monday the 16th, I get the replacement router and it does the same thing. So I
go deal with chat again, we double check then determine it has the SAME issue, so I was told to call the RMA
department again to see what could be done (this is where it went downhill).

I got transferred around, asked the same questions, put on hold more than I’ve ever been in any customer service situation. For instance, in the attached image you’ll see a call for 44 mins 44 seconds, 30 of that was on hold, I counted. I was told that I needed to talk to an advanced tech (this was after the first call you see for 52:37), in the call that was 52:37 I was told that since I spent an hour dealing with chat then just about another hour on the phone, that I would have a call that night to get this resolved, and I said that’s fine and agreed to have them call me back, I said “call anytime tonight, I will be up until about 1am”, 12:30am hits and I don’t get the call back, so I call them (see call listed 1
hr 35min 34sec), they told me that it would actually be 24 hours for a callback, at this point I’m frustrated, so I
ask for a manager, then someone tells me they can get me to the advanced tech dept, after 20 minutes on hold I hear
back from the tech finally and they say there is no way they can get me to a tech because they are all busy on other
calls. Frustrated, I get very angry and demand that someone take care of this immediately, I get placed on hold for
another 15 minutes, then get the same rep (didn’t get IDs over the phone, was hard to understand the accents) telling
me nothing can be done and to wait for a callback, I asked if they could guarantee me a callback by Noon (that would
be roughly 11 hours after this call ended), and he said yes.

Fast forward 11 hours, I call from work since they told me I wouldn’t need to be near my equipment (at this point all
I want is my money back to buy a working router, or a different model sent to me). You will see the call that was
44:44, I kept getting passed around again, and more than half of that call was me being on hold, after waiting the
last bit on hold, I decided i was fed up, have spent almost 4 hours of my time at this point, including the time
doing the technical support chat, hung up and called the corporate office as listed on their website. After briefly
explaining my situation, the person who answered the phone guaranteed me a callback shortly, I ended up receiving a
callback from the number listed as 1267 that lasted 45 minutes, I thought this was my advanced tech, nope, another
general person at linksys who spent 45 minutes, just to tell me what everyone else did. they called again about 30
minutes later and it was an actual advanced tech who basically told me that the whole issue is electromagnetic
interference and that there’s no way to fix this issue and that the only way to fix it is to isolate it which I cant
do without expensive equipment (which I found to a bit of a cop out since the Belkin N1 Vision router I had before
never had the issue). So after over 4 hours of a 24 hour period, all I got was a free return shipping label from him
to send back the defective one so I didn’t have to pay for that.

I’m really frustrated to the point where I almost dont want linksys products anymore, for all the testing I was
using two Linksys brand wireless N cards (WPC300n and WEC600n) and this is the support I get. 4 hours of runaround,
and no results. If anyone at consumerist has any extra eecb info I would appreciate it.

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