This is a bit of a rant with someone background about a wireless bridging from our main site to a satelite site 70m away.

The initial setup had a linksys router (.11n) just running as an AP with a linksys wap200 (.11g) access point running in repeat mode. The wap200 was getting a 50% signal and data rates were averaging 8 Mbps - so not great.

I purchased the linksys wireless N wap4400n access point quite a few months ago to upgrading to connection to 11n. First mistake was not checking that is had AP mode, which it doesn't, which really miffed me considering it's touted as a business series device.

Since this couldn't replace the wap200 as a repeater NOR as a bridge I figured it'd be a good time to replace the router since it wasn't being fully utilised and we needed the router somewhere else. That's when I discovered that the wap200 unit wasn't able to repeat or bridge the wap4400n...so it ended up being stuck on the other end of the wap200 as an AP and the wap200 set to bridge instead of repeat. This should've increased data rates but they were still around 8mbps.

So finding a wireless N access point with AP modes led me to the D-Link 1353. I set this up at the satelite running AP Client bridging from the wap4400n that I set up at the main site (router went where it needed to be). The connection was set to N mode 40mhz wideband, mac filtering, no ssid broadcast, and WPA encryption. I set the wap200 to be the AP from the DL-1353.

Now, the dl-1353 shows a signal strength of 80% and says the connection is 11n, great....not, the data rates are now less than 8mbps (even when wired directly to the dl-1353) and what's worse, the connection now starts dropping...after doing some reading, it seems that the wap4400n has an issue where it drops connections on a regular basis, made worse when running WPA2...

So I disable encryption since it's mac filtered and not broadcast and try again...data rates are 8mbps and the connection drops less often. I'm thinking it's the new dl-1353 unit causing it so thought to test this by connecting to the wap4400n wirelessly from a laptop and see what's going on, hello, data rates are only 8mbps even with 100% signal when they should be 11n speeds...laptop says it's connected at 300mbps, 100% signal, but transfers are terribly slow at the monitor says 8mbps - WTF?

I looked into all the settings and there's no bandwidth limiting, nothing to say that rates shouldn't be ALOT higher.

After further reading on the Inet I see i'm not the only person having this issue - some say it's the firmware that's killed it, great help that is.

My advice - DO NOT buy a Linksys WAP4400N