| Belkin F5D8230-4 Wireless 802.11x Pre-N Router |
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Model: F5D8230-4
Brand: Belkin
Manufacturer: Belkin Components
Average Rating: 
(submit your review here)
Total Reviews: 216
Form factor: External
Hardware platform: PC
Data link protocol: Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, IEEE 802.11n (draft), IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g
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| Features: |
Pre-N speeds and coverage mean 4x greater coverage than standard 802.11g and 4x greater speed than standard 802.11g
Wirelessly share a broadband cable or DSL Internet connection
Built-in 4-port 10/100 Ethernet switch
High resistance to wireless interference--the router will sense potential interference and shift to the clearest available channel
Note: Pre-N routing speeds require an optional Belkin Pre-N wireless networking adapter |
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| Description: |
| Belkin Wireless 802.11x Pre-N Router - This wireless network router features Belkin's Pre-N networking technology. Pre-N offers you amazing advantages in speed, coverage, & performance when compared to other wireless 802.11x networks. Some of the benefits include up to 800% greater coverage and up to 600% greater speed than 802.11g! If a standard 802.11g or 802.11b networking product is introduced into the Pre-N network, the Pre-N router will not drop to the lowest networking speed. When used with 802.11g & 802.11b devices, the Pre-N router improves their wireless coverage by up to 20%! Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) Support Web Content & Parental Control Filter (6 months free) - provides over 50 fully configurable filters Pop-Up Blocker (6 months free) - provides pop-up, adware, & spyware blocking |
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| User Reviews (216 total): |
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Very Disappointed, February 19, 2006
By Moeslife
I thought I was going to love this router and all my computers would share a faster single. Well it didn't work out like that I had to reinstall it 3 times on my main coputer and it still didn't work and to make matters worst after i added and rebooted the third time my hard drive crashed now I have to send off for a restore disc. My laptop can still get the signal but the router stops sending basically when it wants to so I lose my connection in the middle of work and can't get it back up for sometimes hours. My other belkin routers work like a dream and this is a nightmare. I've lost everything off my other comp and this one I'm afraid is not far behind. I don't know if I'll ever buy another belkin product.
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Unstable wireless, stable wired, February 14, 2006
By Chet (Stamford, CT USA)
I purchased this router with very high hopes for it's range. The MIMO lived up to the hype as far as signal strength, but the router was just too unstable. I returned it and opted for the Linksys WRT54GL instead.
Here is why I sent it back:
1) The wireless did not work properly. I had a single machine with excellent signal strength associated with the router (WEP enabled, Firewall enabled). Certain websites (via SSL mostly), would simply hang. Examples: www.gmail.com, www.aol.com, etc. I put up a packet sniffer on both sides of the wireless connection and many of the packets never got to the router. I tried reducing the MTU on the wireless card, but that had no effect. Tried changing channels, standing 3ft away from the router, etc. Nothing worked. At the same time, plugging the laptop directly into the router via ethernet eliminated all the problems. The wireless card in the laptop is a Orinoco Silver 802.11b card which works with several other Access Points/Routers with no issue.
2) The router would lock up from time to time. For seemingly no reason, the router would stop responding. You could not get to it via the web interface and the only rememdy was a hard reset.
3) The Access Point mode either does not work or is counterintuitive. Since I have another router, I decided to try using the Belkin Pre-N router just as an access point. Once I flipped the setting in the config, the router stopped working all together. I tried every combination of wires in the back that I found others had tried, but the router was locked up. A hard reset was the only rememdy.
4) Lack of support. There was no updated firmware, and no knowledge base articles on these issues. I tried to call technical support, but after holding for several minutes I gave up. The only support seemed to be many unhappy users posting to blogs/newsgroups about the same issues and lack of response from Belkin.
I ordered this router with very high expectations, but was extremely disappointed in it's lack of stability. Using the device as a router for the wired portion seems to work well, but anything having to do with using it as a wireless device was useless.
My hope is that some day Belkin will update the firmware and I can give it another shot, but for now it needs more testing.
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Totally, totally sweet, February 12, 2006
By Peter (Chicago, IL)
I can sit in the back room of the coffee shop across the street from my house and get 4 or 5 bars off this thing. People in NW Indiana are probably stealing my bandwidth.
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A really good product, February 7, 2006
By Barankin (NYC, NY)
Had I not seen so many negative reviews about this router recently, I would not write this review. But for some reason there are plenty of them posted on this site, so this is my $.02 worth.
This is a great product from the small details such as instructions, packing, and design to the router itself.
Before this, I had a CompUSA 802.11g router that died after three months of less than flawless service. Back then, I thought this was bad, but after my next one, a Linksys, went down during its first week, I recognized that three months is a quite decent life span for this wireless technology, though `wireless' is not really an accurate description as my Dell notebook was not able to connect with either the CompUSA nor the Linksys router.
The pre N router worked just fine from the start, and now that my notebook's finally gone wireless, I've gone crazy from happiness.
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Great Performance, but POOR Firewall. Power Users Beware!!!, February 7, 2006
By K.S. (Bay Area, CA)
I bought this to replace my D-Link 624 due to it cutting out and degraded performance over time (probably due to the increase of other wireless networks in my apartment complex).
The good: This blows away my old router in speed. No dropouts, just solid performance. Installation was pretty easy...
...until I got to setting up my VNC, Web, & FTP servers...
The bad: The firewall stinks. You have very limited configuration options. Port forwarding also doesn't work correctly. If you want to host a website, FTP server, VPN, VNC, etc on your network to view or access from the outside world... This router will not work for you. Read the other negative reviews about this. There are workarounds, another reviewer on here used his old router (with the wireless disabled) to handle WAN traffic, and this one to handle the wireless. Ugh!
Advanced power users BEWARE!!! Regular users will never know and this will be a great product for them. CNET editors rated this #1 which is why I bought it. Unfortunatly I've lost some confidence in their editor picks.
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Great Router, January 31, 2006
By John F. Wayland (USA)
I've used several wireless routers in the past, and this one blows them all away in range and speed. I currently live in a three level townhouse. My router is on the first floor and I often use my laptop on the third floor. I've had to settle for wireless b, because my g router just didn't have the range. And even with b I often had interference from one or more of the five or 6 other routers in the area, from my neighbors. And yes, I did try all the channels. This router works flawlessly. Great product. The other routers I used were Linksys.
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Not a full function router!, January 31, 2006
By T. Wells (St Augustine FL)
The Belkin Pre-N router turned out to be fast, but incapable.
I run a web site and an FTP site inside my LAN, and must access them locally for maintenance. This is not possible (in a very practical sense) with the Belkin router! In a way it can partly be done by using the local ip address, but it is very labor-intensive, inconvenient and can't be totally successfully done...
The previous Netgear router did this maintenance fine, but alas, it locked up or froze frequently.
So it's off to find another router that neither locks up nor prevents me from doing maintenance.
The most galling part of this experience is the attitude from Belkin: "none of our routers does loopback". "You must go outside your network to do maintenance".
If they had been upfront about this, it would have saved me many hours, many dollars and many telephone calls to India.
Well, now you know -
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Belkin didn't ring a bell, January 31, 2006
By Y. KIM
I bought it because many ppl rate this high, but for me, it wasn't pleasure to get it. I had 2 of it but one didn't work properly. It worked for 10 minutes fine, but then suddenly lost signal and didn't work at all. I reset it and tried it but samething happened, so I just returned it.
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One of the best Routers available!, January 30, 2006
By Kelly (Christchurch, New Zealand)
I bought this router after reading many reviews on the internet. I finally decided to buy it and I wasn't dissapointed. It is an amazing device and it was very easy to set up, took me just under 10 minutes. It has a great range, fast stable connection and good encryption. I really don't have anything bad to say about it! A great router.
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Not as great as I'd hoped. Distance claims seem overrated., January 26, 2006
By Leesdottir (santa rosa, ca United States)
Got the Belkin about 3 weeks ago. Using a PC with XP. Setup was fine, but couldn't get good service 50 feet away in the house. Got a refrigerator and washing machine in the way. Went to the setup home page to change my wireless channel from auto. No improvement on channel 1, no improvement on channel 6. Changed to channel 11 and disaster. Channel never loaded and my computer was frozen. Did a restart. Did a reinstall of the router and nothing, router couldn't connect.
Called support. Support took me through all the repair steps, then decided I must have a dead router. Exchanged router the following day. Same problem on new router.
Exchanged router. Didn't try to change wireless channel. Still get only three bars in the room next to the router (1 wall--no real barriers except sheetrock) Still can't get any signal at the back of the house. I'm looking for a range extender.
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Once again utter failure--, January 25, 2006
By ET (Seattle)
I have already thrown my first Belkin Router away. Believe or not this one started out great with easy setup and throughput increased from 700Kbps to about 2.6MB using Speedtest as my measure. This lasted about 4 weeks. Then utter disaster, lost connections every 10 minutes. The product just failed miserably. How aggravating to keep pumpting money into what I thought would finally be a stable wireless solution only to have it fail after 4 weeks of operation. I am using the Belking pre-n card in a normal xp configuration. I ended up running ethernet cable back over the link simply to attain stability. What a pain--stupid wires running across the property because of the utter failure of the wireless companies to get stability in their offering. Reading the other reviews apparently I am not the only one with this experience.
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Requires rebooting once a week or more, January 24, 2006
By Chris (Montreal, QC)
This box was mainly used as a wired router by my house because we just had the wired Cat5 cable setup in place and we lived in an area contaminated with several 802.11 signals criss-crossing my house. So I can't really comment on how this box compares to other wireless boxes in range or signal power, but I can say that while this router is fairly user-friendly, and after cloning my computers MAC address, was up and connected to the internet... that this router seems to be buggy.
Port-forwarding was simple to setup on it, it features advanced features like UPnP, auto-updating, and external (WAN) configuration, and everything seems to be good. But then the whole thing, using the latest firmware, will just crash every couple of days to every two weeks and need to be unplugged and plugged back in. I found that kind of annoying, when it would happen in the middle of a conversation or a download, or when I would wake up and find my internet didn't work. I've used other routers that don't crash for months on end; this one just felt like it was every week I was getting on my knees underneath my computer desk and restarting it. Hopefully a future firmware release will lessen that crash-proneness of the device.
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After trying others, this one worked as advertised, January 18, 2006
By KeithH (Boston, MA)
I am very pleased with this router. Installation had a hickup, but it was my fault, I tried to install another device on the router during the quick setup which confused it. I was able to quickly resolve it after reading the manual. Yes, sometimes you have to read the manual...
I have 2 notebooks with 102.11b adapters, and 2 desktops with 102.11g adapters on my network. I was looking for a WAP that would increase my signal strength, and was not looking for faster speed.
Having had good success with previous Linksys routers, I bought the new WRT54GX2. I had a horrible time with the Linksys device. The setup was straight forward, but I experienced a 4X slower speed with the 102.11b adapters, and a 2X slower speed with the 102.11g adapers. I spent hours with Linksys support to no avail.
So I decided to do some research and the reviews were overwhelmingly in favor of this Belkin router/wap. So I decided to try it. It actually works as advertised. I am seeing a better than 20% signal strength improvement with the b/g adapters. The speed has actually improved. And the signal strength is as good as the new Linksys. I have no problems with PPTP and VPN connections, even though I have read other reviews complaining of issues. I have actually never experienced any drop outs either. Playing internet games on a WAP is always a problem, and my son connects directly to the router because of these issues.
The bottom line is it works. No more, no less.
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Great range and speed, January 14, 2006
By s3113r2005 (Anaheim, CA)
I purchased this product along with the corresponding Belkin PCI Pre-N PCI adapter after numerous attempts and failures trying to extend the range of my old D-Link DI-514 wireless router with a D-Link DWL-G710 range extender.
Setup and installation for this product was quick and easy and worked the first time! I highly recommend this product along with the Belkin Pre-N PCI adapter as they both greatly increased the range, strength, and speed of my wireless signal.
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If you need a stable connection, STAY AWAY, January 8, 2006
By SuperDangerBoy (Pasadena, CA United States)
It was easy to set up but it drops the connection every 30 minutes or so on both wired and wireless. If you do large downloads or play games it makes this box next to useless. Tech support was useless on this matter and if you search the web everyone has had this trouble for almost one year now.
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Addendum to my previous review - four stars now, January 6, 2006
By Mark Shindler (Tucson, AZ)
In fairness to Belkin, and this device, I would like to make a modification to my review. After reading some of the comments on "Broadband.com" I have learned that the WAP aspect of this devices CAN be used. After configuring the device as a "Wireless Access point", and setting the address, you MUST move your connection to one of the four lan ports. The WAN port is no longer active, and only the lan ports can be used at this point. Interesting that there is no mention of this in the manuals, website, and the seemingly knowlegable tech support person at Bekin did not know this either, and simply stated that this version (2000) device cannot be used as a WAP until some future release of a firmware update. At this point I'm very happy with the performance of the wireless side of the device, the router aspect, and the WAP aspect of the device. My complaint at this point would be poor documentation for the WAP aspect, and sub-par tech support.
(My previous review)
I must state that with the basic default settings this router performs flawlessly, and I give it 5 stars for that. The problem is that I'm trying to configure the device as a access point without the router/dhcp/firewall functions. It doesn't work.
The version of F5D8230-4 that is available these days is the 2000 version. I've worked with the device extensively, and have found the device to be full of bugs and un-usable regarding advanced features, that is to say configuring the device as an access point. The latest firmware update, 2.01.02 is no help either. Tech support confirmed the bugs, and stated that they didn't expect a firmware update that would fix the problem until at least the end of 1st quarter 2006, or later. If you are using the device as a router/dhcp/firewall device it is a wonderful WAP. I recommend it. If you're looking for a wireless access point to extend an existing network, you better make sure you're getting the earlier version 100X device. Also, there are tricks for loading the linksys firmware into the 100X version device to extend it's functionality even further. The problem is that the 100X version has been out of production for some time, and is increasingly difficult to find.
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Horrible reliability - fails to work, January 2, 2006
By ... (Denville, NJ, USA)
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13541132~days=9999~start=180
Go
This thing if under any load, drops all ability to communicate on port 80. Only recourse is to reset the router. This is a known problem and Belkin refuses to fix.
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SImple, Fast and What Range !, January 1, 2006
By Bruce Z. Allain (West Shore of Naragansett Bay)
The old g router finally took the big dirt nap (not a Belkin). I had just picked up the Belkin N router days before as a "just in case" backup. Saturday morning and the opportunity presented itself. Within 10 minutes I had this router up and running. After 5 more minutes entering the Mac addresses of all the computers in the network we were running and secure. Of course I have set up 4 routers previously BUT the software was easy to follow. Fast internet speed and the range is excellent considering the last router required a aftermarket antenna to get this range. Second floor and through several walls and the signal is more than adequate.
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Great range/speed, December 28, 2005
By T. Price (Houston)
Big improvement over my old Belkin G Router. I first used my old Belkin G laptop adapter with the Pre-N router, and while the range was better, it wasn't as good as I had hoped. Then when I added a Pre-N laptop adapter, I saw all of the promised improvement of range/speed.
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Great wireless, rotten firewall, December 26, 2005
By Neil Fairall (Massachusetts)
I purchased the Belkin Pre-N router for one reason only which was to get better range and throughput. My existing 802-11G router couldn't cover my whole house adequately and the Belkin did an admirable job of making up for those shortcomings.
However, after using the Belkin for several weeks it is clear that the firewall implementation is lousy for people who want to do something a little more sophisticated than get basic Internet access. It does a great job of shutting down P2P traffic even when you configure the firewall to allow the appropriate ports - or they are registered by UPNP. Even turning the firewall off didn't seem to help. Additionally the VPN pass through didn't work as I expected it to and I wasn't able to make inbound PPTP connections.
As another user did, I have reinstated my old router with the wireless turned off to act as my WAN router and am using the Belkin as a wireless access point only. In this configuration it works fine.
In conclusion, if you just want a wireless router with great range for basic Internet functionality this will work fine for you. If you want to do more with it you will probably need another router to handle your WAN connection. Of course, if you are the type of person who wants to do more then you probably know how to work around this or already have an old router you are replacing.
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