It’s getting crowded at the botoom. With the N1 wireless Router F5D8231-4, Belkin joins the vendors hawking draft-n products. Despite dramatic improvements in the router’s usability, its performance is bad. The router’s Atheros Xspan chipset came out a few weeks after the Broadcom and Marvell draft-n chipsets in the Buffalo, Linksys, and Netgear routers, which did poorly on the tests. Performance was as disappointing as it was with those routers and with the D-Link RangeBooster N 650. Neither Atheros box reached the maximum test distance of 160 feet, but the F5D8231-4 fared even worse at close range and was beaten by the best pre-n routers at all ranges. It did outdo the 802.11g products mostly.

The dreadful performance is a shame considering all the router’s benefits: good documentation, a clean interface, a comprehensive list of common applications for the virtual server port-forwarding section, and more.

Source : Review by PCmag.com