The IT Nerd

You might recall that Linksys recently pushed out a firmware update for their WRT32X router which is their flagship router. The firmware in question caused issues and resulted in frustration for many who use that router. Including yours truly. I was affected by this when they pushed this out. And I had issues when I tried to get help, though I was eventually able to roll back to a firmware that worked. Though that didn’t work for everyone. But by that point, things had escalated to such a point that both Netgear and ASUS were serving up routers to me in the hopes that I would review them and give them some positive PR in order to steal some marketshare from Linksys as they clearly were seeing the discontent from WRT32X users who just wanted this issue fixed. And they felt that Linksys wasn’t hearing them. So I offered some free advice to Linksys as one of the things that I do is help companies to build high performing technical support and customer service contact centers.

The good news is that Linksys has decided to take my advice. I had a conversation with a Linksys representative yesterday, and the following is happening.

1. Linksys has publicly acknowledged that this issue exists via this note on their community forum here. Of note, this issue also affects the WRT3200ACM router as well.
2. I complained that there was no easy way to get the previous firmware that worked. Linksys has now fixed that by posting this support document that walks one through downloading and resetting the WRT32X. This is exactly what I did and it remedied the problems that I had been seeing.
3. Linksys is actively investigating this and they want to get a firmware that resolves this issue out on the streets as soon as possible. There was an rough ETA that was told to me, but I will not share it here as from personal experience, those ETAs can slip and it would not be fair to Linksys to hold them to that ETA. But what I will do for readers who have been following this issue is that I will test this firmware as soon as it’s available to me and I’ll let you know if it resolves the issue or not. In other words, I will be your “crash test dummy” so that you don’t have to do it yourself.

There’s some other things that we discussed in terms of the customer service that I experienced that Linksys is looking at as well. I’m going to circle back to that in a later story once the WRT32X issues are resolved as I really feel that what they’re doing to address those issues is a good news story that Linksys users will want to hear. The fact is that Linksys is doing what they need to do to resolve this. Some would say it should have happened quicker, and perhaps they have a point. But I’ve been doing this long enough that I have seen examples where a company does or says nothing at all. Thus I will give credit to Linksys for being engaged in this issue and I look forward to being to post an update to say that it’s been resolved very shortly.

This entry was posted on December 15, 2017 at 8:58 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Linksys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.