Advantages: Reliable, Fast, Easy to configure, Lots of features, USB for sharing drives Disadvantages: Bit expensive, Not full speed with every machine
INTRO
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
The router looks very stylish and stands up tall rather than laid down flat. It doesn't appear to have been designed to be laid down flat like many other routers, which may be to ...
Advantages: Fairly easy to set up, easy to use, reliable, looks good. Disadvantages: Bandwidth Innacurate.
We'd wanted to upgrade our router for a while to cope with Rich playing on his Xbox online mainly as we kept getting lag, which was especially apparent if I was also browsing the net (which I generally was) even to the point of Rich being disconnected mid game. He was getting annoyed with it so when we saw this router on offer at ebuyer.com for £69.99 (but has since gone back up to its previous price of £89.99); I jumped at the chance to get it and now we have it, I thought it was worth writing a review about, so here we are!
My review will be based on my experience of the router, and not a full technological break down of what it is capable of etc as that is readily available online from the manufacturer and would probably bore most people to tears anyway.
The first thing I notice when opening the box is how big the router is ...
Advantages: ease of setup,reliable connection Disadvantages: not the fastest on the market
When looking to go wireless in the computer world it is an absolute minefield when it comes to wireless routers/modems. I sat at my latop(tethered to the telephone socket with wires) scouring google for write ups about this router and that router when i came across this one. Now this is rated as being the best selling router/modem in the UK and has been for some time. I think i paid around £40 from ebuyer.com. I chose it because of the fact its reasonably priced. Its a good trustworthy brand and it seemed to come up to scratch on speed.
Upon opening the box the installation was very simple indeed. I just followed the instructions that came with the router and hey prsto i was wireless on my laptop.Software is easy to install and self explanatory. Its not the fastest band of router on the market but for what i needed it was ample ...
Product Information for "Netopia R5100 - router" »
Manufacturer's product description
R5100 Serial Router integrates ease-of-use, powerful 'business-class' features, and a built-in growth path to provide small to medium-sized businesses, branch offices and schools with a dedicated, high-bandwidth connection to the Internet or corporate intranet. With this type of 'always-on' connection, you can host Internet services including web, email or FTP servers, or integrate remote sites into one corporate network. The Netopia R5100 Serial Router is designed to make the complicated process of router installation and configuration easy and intuitive. The Netopia SmartStart Wizard lets you set up the router over a network connection using the built-in 8-port Ethernet hub. Netopia's SmartIP combines Network Address Translation (NAT) with a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server and client, making Internet access economical, secure, and easy to administer. Setting up a Frame Relay network has never been so easy. Netopia's innovative SmartMatch feature vastly simplifies network configuration by automatically associating the Data Link Circuit Identifiers (DLCI) that define Frame Relay partners with the IP addresses of the remote routers.
