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.
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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.
[tags]Belkin N1, 802.11n[/tags]
