USR was aquired by 3com some years back. I certainly would count USR to be a big brand; however, I wouldn't let the name fool me into thinking they were good when they came to networking. Linksys and SMC are by far much more mature networking companies and have products that demonstrate their experience.
Those of us old fogey's probably remember the good of days when saying you owned a USR courier meant something. Now a days, they've been pretty silent with just a handful of networking products.
Having a friend in need of a wifi router, I decided to bite, but instead, I decided to buy locally and test it out first. The router does look cheap, but I personally like it's stylings.
The interface is duplicated from their website and modified to work with the router(Kinda cheesy and cheap way to go IMHO).
Performance and range I found to be pretty good, comparable if not better than more established brands. I do want to point out there is no SPI so that's probably why it performs so much better.(SPI = Stateful Packet Inspection).
The Wifi security is far from being secure. Although major companies like microsoft, netgear, and many others have recognized WPA as a security standard, USR claims they are waiting for ratification. As far as I know, WPA has been a standardized for quite some time. The only thing pending ratification is the 802.11i spec which is overdue at this point. If you are concerned about wifi security, don't go WEP.
If you need a cheap router and don't care about security, this is a good deal. Of course the idea of buying from tigerdirect seems risky to me.
Good deal find, good product on paper, bad product in practice. USR in my opinion is still new to the networking arena and when you use as many different routers as I have, it's painfully obvious how much firmware development this router needs. By far it is nicer than buying a generic product.
Just my two cents.