Belkin N1 Wireless Modem Router - wireless router > Reviews > Light up your darkest crevice in blue...

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Very fast
Reliability	Good
Ease of Installation	Satisfactory
Ease of use	Easy
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	compact, good front - panel display, wall - mountable
Disadvantages:	temperamental web interface, lots of virtual knobs, bells and whistles

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Bring the Internet into the comfort of your own home.
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After a few years of daily accessing the Internet from home, you begin to realise how much that corner of a dark room where the telephone-line enters your home really isn't the best place to sit doing it...

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?

Cue the Belkin N1 Wireless Modem Router (with MIMO), Part # F5D8631uk4a, EAN/UPC 7-22868-59630-2.

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).

Here's how I managed to get it going to accommodate my need to work from a room at the very opposite end of the house from where the ADSL connection was installed...

What you get for your money
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The silver-topped Belkin box looks attractive, with HIGH performance being the most obvious feature on the front. One side-panel gives you three easy steps to get you started - 1. Connect; 2. Configure; 3. Set Up. The other side-panel shows the technical specs, and the back panel explains clearly what's in the box, what it does and the way the unit communicates to you in blue (or amber if something's amiss!) icons what's happening between you and the rest of the Internet to help troubleshoot where things might be going wrong...

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.

Getting the Internet to co-operate
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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.

Here I detracted from the Belkin "Quick Installation Guide" card instructions, firmly ignoring the CD with the "Setup Assistant" as Belkin's "Step 2", preferring instead to jack-in to the unit myself and pick up on the instructions given on a smaller card in the Belkin box, "Wireless Security Setup Guide".

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 .

Within about 15minutes, after exploring the options on the "Internet WAN" section of the Belkin Setup screens on http://192.168.2.1, and typing in the ISP account details saved from my previous ADSL modem, my Belkin modem/router was showing in bright blue that it could see the ADSL connection to my ISP, and also it could see the rest of the Internet - so much so that it could get out and show me information from the Belkin corporate website.

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

'Ere, who's SSID?
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Being fairly savvy of matters wireless, I read with interest the instructions and advice that Belkin gave on the next part of the setup - bringing the Wireless transmitter functionality on-line. It ticks all the right boxes, telling you how "not good" it is to keep the defaults on your networking kit, especially if it's wireless: you wouldn't want the neighbours to be able to use your expensive ADSL link to surf the Web, would you? Or maybe you might, perhaps you get on better with your neighbours than I do with mine...

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!).

The Belkin default SSID was, in retrospect, actually fairly unique - using the word BELKIN and appending some of the unique letters/numbers from the unit's individual MAC/hardware address to the end. In any case, I had pre-existing wireless clients out there, shouting for access to the Internet in their own way, so I keyed in the SSID I used for my previous 3Com wireless router, and was happy to see these clients start to authenticate and connect into the new Belkin without further modification. Another blue light, "wireless" came on on the front panel display!

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!