The Belkin N+ router is one of the higher end (consumer) wireless modem router offerings from Belkin. It cost me £85 from PC World, but can probably be found for a bit less if you shop online. The Cable version costs a little less. Reason I bought this one was because two PCs in the house with wireless cards kept losing the wireless connection when I was using a Linksys router (my own PCs / laptops were fine though!). I replaced that with a second hand Belkin, which worked fine but unfortunately, a power cut killed the wireless on it. Liking the performance of that cheaper Belkin router, I decided to stick with Belkin and get this one!

DESIGN

Something quite different to what I’m used to having on a router is the bandwidth indicator or speedometer. It has blue bars that light up on the router showing how much traffic is going through it. This is great if several people share a broadband connection in the house as you’d know if someone’s hogging the bandwidth just by looking at the router (in my case, it’s usually me!).

Setting up is the same as any router. It comes with a CD, which I think can walk you step by step through the settings but I just log into the router in a web browser to add my settings. The user interface is very straight forward with everything under the appropriate headings. I can find the options that I want at a glance. Internet connection settings, port forwarding and wireless settings are easily found and set. If you get stuck, the manual on the CD or the Belkin website should answer any questions.

PERFORMANCE, CONNECTION AND STABILITY

Wireless aside, the router also has four Ethernet ports so you could plug PCs and network devices in directly should that be convenient as wired connections are always more reliable. Speed may be about the same though if you get good wireless speeds as the router isn’t a gigabit router (1000Mbit) and only has standard 100Mbit Ethernet ports.

Streaming a single High Definition video to both my PC and laptop at the same time proved to be fine as well. You can also copy files into the drive attached as well as just access so that’s brilliant as it means you can turn your USB drives into network drives. In a way, this is better than sharing folders on your Windows machines as you can come across all sorts of sharing problems and the computer sharing the file needs to be switched on.

Belkin are a massive brand when it comes to networking devices so they should be around for a while. Software, firmware updates and user manuals and documentation can be downloaded from the Belkin website. I seem to have misplaced the included CD but I managed to download the Storage Manager software and a newer firmware from their site without any registration or fuss. Download speeds were fast. If you’re not very technical, Belkin’s site has a lot of tutorials and information on just about everything you would need to know for each of their products, including this router.

This is one of the best routers I’ve ever used and it hasn’t given me any grief until I had a power cut, which pretty much broke it. It is a bit on the expensive side but not as much as business routers. There is another router from Belkin that costs even more than this one but that one tells you your broadband speed and other stuff on a display on the router itself, how cool is that? As for this Belkin N+ modem router, it has all the features you could need and more unless you need VPN (connects you to a network securely over the Internet (Virtual Private Network)) but it’s not meant to be a business router so can’t blame them for that. Power cuts can kill the thing but that aside, highly recommended as you do get a lifetime warranty with Belkin.