Belkin F5D6231-4 Wireless Cable/DSL Router
by Belkin Components
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List Price: Our Price: $36.95 You Save: $28.24 (43%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $5.00 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Belkin F5D6231-4 Wireless Cable/DSL Router
Customer Review: Great router
Summary: 5 Stars
I love my router and feel I need to defend it. I got this thing, unpacked it, stuck it on my DSL modem and it runs...well. No resets, I get excellent signal strength all through my 3 floor brick house, MAC filtering works perfectly (doesn't block connections, but they are useless) and the encryption is as good as you can get from WEP. The PPoE works great and the DHCP assigns wireless IPs without fail.
I might suggest that some of the people who had problems might try to make sure the thing is sitting away from their computer case, as is instructed in the manual.
Customer Review: good value
Summary: 5 Stars
After 25 years in the information technology industry, I've come to respect Belkin. Anything they do, they do well.This unit is sound and easy to set up.
It is only 80211b, so it's 11Mbps, but even a cable modem only intermittently gets above 1Mbps, so for almost everone, it's plenty. Plus the peripheral cards for the devices you want to use with it are less than the newer 80211g.
It does currently only support WEP, and Belkin, the last time I asked them, do not have plans to add WPA functionality to this unit, which would provide stronger encryption.
Customer Review: worked for me (mostly)
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased both this item and the Belkin Wireless Notebook Network Card (F5D6020) for an incredible price at a major computer store. I wasn't really in the market for either product, but the price was too good to ignore, and wireless networking was something I had always wanted to try. Naturally, I was a bit suspicious that it was indeed "too good to be true," but after installing it today, I see I had little reason to worry.My household was already running a 4-5 computer wired network using the Microsoft Wired Base Station. Belkin claims that the setup takes only 3 minutes; mine took about 5, but only because I had to initially disable my old network and plug in my DSL connection directly into the computer that was installing the Belkin setup software. The setup was then incredibly simple - since I previously had a network set up, I didn't need to do anything else to my other computers other than plug them in (the router has 4 access points for wired network connections), and after installing the network card on my notebook computer, I was off typing away all over my house on a wireless network. Pretty cool.
As a basic user, I find that this product fulfills all my needs. My only criticism would be that the network connections between one of my wired computers and my now wireless notebook computer seem a bit compromised, but that may be more due to user ignorance than anything else.
Bottom line - a useful product, and (if you got the deal that I did) well worth the price.
Customer Review: No real complaints so far
Summary: 4 Stars
I got this because it was one of the cheaper wireless routers, and so far am happy with it. I set it up by hand instead of the wizard that they included with the package. I had the wired portion working just fine in under 5 minutes.The wireless was a slightly different situation. I use Mozilla Firebird as my main browser, and when it comes to some of the buttons when setting up the WEP keys, the 'Generate' keys do not work. This could be Mozilla, but I haven't had any such problems on websites. Once that was set up, getting encryption turned on and working was easy under IE. My Belkin wireless card only supports 64-bit WEP, which is fine for me, and I haven't had the router start to broadcast the SSID at all yet as others have stated.
I get pretty good range (100' through 3 walls, and about 200' through a single wall) so no complaints there. The web interface is the best I've used yet, especially after digging through the interfaces on Linksys or D-Link routers.
I give this a 4 because of it not working 100% with Mozilla-based browsers, so I'd hate to see people try and use every feature of this router if they run nothing but Linux (which if you're running Linux, why buy a router? ;) )
Customer Review: Easy to set up but could have better troubleshooting guide
Summary: 4 Stars
The router is easy to install with the Install Wizard - by this I mean getting the router to make a connection to your ISP (have your username and password on hand). This literally takes only a few minutes. Any other adjustment to the router settings are done through the browser interface. It helps if you are well versed in the terminology and know how you want the router configured as the instructions tell you how to do things but not necessarily why you should or should not make changes. I'm still learning.
I did have problems making a connection between my Apple Powerbook with Airport to the router but this turned out to be solved by going through the browser interface and trying different channels on the router. After a few tries I got a signal on the Powerbook. However, I had to do this on my own because there was no suggestion that this might be a problem in either the Belkin or Apple literature or websites. The range seems to be what they advertise although I didn't bother venturing outside after verifying my whole house is covered (two floors, about 1000 sq feet each).
So. . .5 for 5 for the product but minus one star for the documentation...