Belkin N1 Wireless Router

With its intuitive status icons, up-to-date security options, and stellar support, the Belkin N1 Wireless Router is on the path to 802.11n wireless networking stardom, but, like other Draft N devices, its performance fails to impress.

Like the Linksys WRT300N and Netgear WNR834B routers, the N1 uses the Draft N spec of the upcoming 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, which could be ratified early in 2007. Belkin’s router offers a mixed 802.11b/g/n mode instead of single-mode operation, however. This discrepancy makes direct performance comparisons impossible, although the N1 did trounce the Linksys and Netgear Draft N routers in mixed-mode and long-range (in mixed mode) throughput tests. Nonetheless, the N1’s overall performance, which was nowhere near the 300Mbps maximum throughput the 802.11n standard promises.

The N1 impressed in other ways, however. Belkin has given its Pre-N router design a makeover, replacing the slate-gray plastic with a slick silver-and-black exterior. Better still, Belkin replaced the standard LED lights with a top-mounted network-status display, which gives you a better handle on your network via icons representing each network element.

The router has all the standard wireless security options, including Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption, stateful packet inspection (SPI) and network address translation (NAT) firewalls, and Media Access Control (MAC) address filtering.