Thread: Belkin N Wireless F5D8233-4 wireless routers

THE BELKIN N FSD8233-4 was the second draft-N router in the shootout, the other being our winner, the Net¬gear WNR834B. This router has two external antennae, and it's about half as big again as the other Belkin router. It has Belkin's standard web-interface, and it's simple enough to configure.

We were expecting this to do quite well, based on the performance of the other Belkin, and the fact that this router has draft-N, and it did ... with one very curious exception. In our tests with Ixchariot, we noticed that this router has major problems handling multiple clients. If you look at the graph on the next page, you'll see a series of sudden drop-offs and then a rise again. This indicates that the router hits some sort of internal limiting point, and all wireless activity just stops. It starts again, rises till it hits the limit, and the cycle repeats. None of the others exhibited this sort of behavior. With just one client connected, it worked well, but we would have to wait for a firmware upgrade to fix the problem before we can rate this higher up. This problem singlehandedly dropped this router from a top three finish to a bottom three finish.



Apart from this, the router was slow¬er than the Netgear WNR834B by a significant margin at close range. A single draft-N client topped out at 18 Mbps. In the same test, the Netgear managed 41 Mbps, which is a lot faster. It did have a much greater range than Netgear, thanks to the dual external antennae. At forty feet, it averaged 3.8 Mbps, which was a lot better than Netgear's 1.8 Mbps. Of course, the minute we started testing with two or more clients, our average speeds dropped, thanks to the bug we detailed earlier.

It was difficult to rate this router. On the one hand, it had good coverage and reasonable speeds for a single client. On the other, multiple clients absolutely killed it. We believe that a firmware upgrade that fixes this problem would take this router up our charts, potentially putting it second or third. However, we have to rate based on what we test, not on a potential future improvement, so we're going to have to keep this rout¬er near the bottom of our charts.