Pictures in the glossies of people sitting on their deck in the garden, or relaxing by the river, laptop open with unfettered access to their files back in the office help break the myth that you need to be where the Internet is to use it. Why not bring it to you, be where you want to be and make it follow you?

This black-fronted, three-antenna'd piece of networking wizardry comes with a nice matt silver casing that has wall-mount holes, and claims to push super-fast wireless networking to a radius of 425m from the unit. And it comes with a Manufacturers Lifetime Warranty (sic).

What you get for your money
-----------------------------------------

Inside the box, a nice white flip-top carton with a silver arrow saying "Open here" opens to reveal the front panel of the unit with all components labelled A through E and a single sheet telling you how to put this in place of your current ADSL modem. The step-by-step guide is really clear, telling you the sequence to relocate your existing cables to the new unit, and getting the unit powered-on and connected to a PC or laptop really is a 5-minute job.

As you might have noticed, my view of the world is that the world is inherently wrong, and I am right... a healthy attitude to have, or not.... As my ADSL service is provided to me as a "fixed address" service, the next step was to drag out the instructions I used to get my old ADSL modem connected and working - my service provider's account details and password, the IP address they assigned to me, and the type of configuration they provide to the ADSL point in my house. What I found useful here was to have a few screen shots of the setup screens on my old ADSL unit, which made it a lot easier to transfer the settings to the Belkin unit.

The unit came with a yellow cable to plug into the network interface of my laptop (an old Compaq model), and the "Wireless" setup guide card gave the address to point a browser window at to get into the Belkin configuration screens. Simple enough, and a nice blue icon on the Belkin told me my laptop and the Belkin were happily in communication with each other, and Internet Explorer brought up the config screen when pointed at the addrees http://192.168.2.1 .

So far so good. Now to get the Wireless side of the router configured...

Again, the sheet and the web interface on the router explain about setting up wireless security, with WPA/WPA2-SPK as the recommended here. At this stage, I ignored these and skipped to the settings for the SSID, preferring 2 simple means of keeping my wireless LAN to myself - 1) changing the default SSID, and 2) setting the SSID to "no broadcast" (basically gagging the router so it doesn't keep announcing its presence to the world at large every so often!).

I still have to get around to the WPA/WEP key setup, but for now, my router was (a) functional, and (b) hidden, so I was happy and drew a line under the setup at this point, as all my wireless and wired clients had been successfully migrated to the new Belkin, resplendent on the wall with 4 of 6 front-panel icons blazing blue, within about 30 minutes of opening up the box with the new modem/router!