Home > Consumer Reviews > Belkin N1 Vision Wireless Router (F5D8232-4)

N1 Vision Wireless Router With Status Display

I'm a guy swept away by cool features ... I only picked it up off the shelf to look at it becuase of the LCD display. Its a really convinient way of getting WAN/LAN statistics on the fly and without logging in.

I got online within 10 minutes using the manual setup. I'm personally not one for wizards, I personally think I'm smarter than the products I purchase.. :) I got right online with all of my machines except my roomate has an archaic notebook with an 802.11a card who couldnt even see the router. Thankfully I got him a Airlink101 N PCMCIA card ... problem solved.

It has a Guest SSID which I think is probibly the best idea yet. It allows you to parallel configure an SSID / WPA passkey that allows internet access but no local file access. WOW!

This is a big one for me but, the AC/DC Transformer takes up 1 plug space... with no brick! Its similar to many of the cell phone charger plugs used today.

All in all its a 6/6 stars but there are 2 things that make it a little unfrendly.

First off it takes a good chunk of space up on my shelf, which made replacing my old unit quite a hastle.

Secondly the buttons used for Navigating the LCD menu's are HORRIBLE! They built the buttons under a thick rubber overlay which require too much force to use them conviniently. You have to hold the unit to press them, else it will slide away from you or tips over. Even worse is the rubber mat makes it hard to determine which buttons your pressing.

Its an awsome unit for thoes with an eye for cool cutting edge features and strong fingers.. :)

This is certainly a pretty piece of hardware and I liked the idea of having at-a-glance utilization data.

Unfortunately, the reality isn't nearly as pretty as the picture. Beyond the uncertain build quality (the buttons are worse than my 1982 Sinclair Spectrum), the wireless stack in this thing seems to be as unstable as a coffee-snorting spider monkey. When it is working, I will sometimes seem ping times as high as 55 _seconds_ (55,000 milliseconds!) between a wireless client and the router. Other times, with no apparent difference, ping times run in the <1 millisecond range, where I would expect them.

Ahhh...but that's when it's actually functioning. Every few hours under load, it seems to completely lock up so that I have to pull the power plug and reboot it. I've tried changing wireless channels and settings but I haven't found any combinations that actually work.

Belkin support offered several useless suggestions (obviously boilerplate text) before telling me to return the device for a replacement. I'm waiting for the replacement but I have no confidence that it will operate better than this one.

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UPDATE

As expected, the replacement router is performing no better than the original. I'm currently on the phone with Belkin technical support (on hold, after being transferred twice).

I have to say, I read some of the reviews here and almost shy-ed away from buying the Belkin N1 Vision. But I woke up this morning and my dang Linksys router was disconnected again, man that thing is a piece of crap, I spent an hour thinking it was a computer problem until I pulled the plug on the Linksys.

I hooked up the Belkin router and just went through the screens manually. The firmware was way out of date 00.3 vs 00.15 that is the current version. I updated that first and all went well.

I have no wireless N devices, but all of my wireless G devices have gone way up. I had 76% signal before and I have 96% now, it's amazing.

A couple of things other posters wrote:

IPSec VPN - I connected to VPN and all was well. From the things I read, this was fixed in 00.13 of the firmware, so posters before April or so of this year may have had legitimate problems.

The LCD screen - yeah, the info really isn't that useful, but oh well, if nothing else it's nice bling...

The buttons - the right hand side of the square can be tough to push, but it's not as bad as others made it out to be...

Rebooting after every option - whoever wrote that was either embellishing or Belkin made huge leaps in the firmware. There are only two options that do a 70 sec reboot, one big one does a 180 sec reboot, and all the others do 10 sec config saves. Almost every router out there does a small config save, it's crazy to complain about that.

To summarize, either I got damn lucky with this router or it's received a lot of unfair criticism. I guess there will always be negative critics, for instance, I find the performance of Linksys to be dreadful....

So I am going to make this brief for those of you who don't want to read a lengthy review. This router is pretty, lots of bells and whistles ont he outside and has a real nice display for easy setup, and on the wired side it does connect at 1Gig, but it does not sustain wireless connections for more than 6 hours, the gig speed really isn't gig. On the G and N bandwiths it has roughly half the range of other routers. Finally, tech support (India) was useless and pretty much kept asking me to reboot the laptop that would not connect, turned out that 20 feet away from the router was too far and hence the problem. Bottom line but a Dlink or Linksys, you'kk sepnd less money and have a more reliable product, just no pretty pictures.

I just replaced my Linksys WRT54G with the Belkin N1. I did so because I thought the Linksys was losing range after my home notebook PC routinely dropped its connection speed. Turns out it's my computer's wireless card that's having trouble, but I'm still glad I made the leap to N.

Although I can't comment on true N speeds (still need a N card for my PC), the Belkin N1 plays nicely with all of the Wireless G products in the house (3 notebook PCs, a PS3 and a Linksys Skype phone).

The best features of the router were:

1. Nearly instant setup. Just plug the Belkin N1 into your cable modem and to a PC. Fire up your browser and the setup screen should pop up automatically. If not, just type "routersetup" and away you go. The UI and entire experience is completely 100% better than the WRT54G. No typing in "192.168.1.blah" to get into the setup screen, which many users will find handy.

2. Solid connection speeds

3. Nice design. Compare this router to some of the original N routers released by Linksys, all of which looked like rejects from the Soviet space program circa 1982. The design is so nice that most people wouldn't mind having this sit right on the desk. That's the reason I suppose they included the info screen...which brings me to the one letdown...

The screen itself is nice. There is all kinds of useful info displayed. I suspect that most people have their router on a shelf or somewhere else out of the way, which almost negates the usefulness of the information. The N1 sits about 5 feet from my desk and I can't read it from there, so if I want to check out my upload/download speeds I need to get up and take a look. The most frustrating part of the N1 is the danged navigation buttons. Too much rubber makes it very difficult to navigate the many display options.

Overall, though, this seems like a great option for anyone ready to start transitioning to the high-speed world of Wireless-N.