Home > Consumer Reviews > Belkin 4-Port Cable/DSL Gateway Router

I bought the Belkin 4 port Router for online gaming and Home Networking. I'm no computer wizard but found the setup easy -although a little longer than the 3 minutes quoted on the box! however this was because I wanted to make sure I'd connected everything correctly.

Buy it!

I bought this router for use in our student house with 4 pc's. Initially it works fine ( using NTL broadband 600kb/s) but every time it is on for a few days, it started to sieze up and gradually get slower until the connection was just about lost. I would have to refresh 10 times and wait 5 mins for pages to load and there was no chance of downloading or gaming when this happened. We resorted to an old pc as a gateway over this product. The fualt was the router as confirmed when we plugged just 1 pc directly into the cable modem. Since last week, we have an SMC barricade and this is soo o much faster. No way is this product worth this price...it won't even sell on ebay for £10.. have a look yourself!
Hope this is useful in helping you choose a goodr router.

The 4 Port Router is a great product to buy especially if it is your first time creating a Network at home. Using Windows XP you can simply connect your computers and start using the Network. A good length power cable is supplied but it is best if the router is situated within reasonable distance of each computer.
There is a special ring on the router so if you decide to buy more of this product you can connect them together saving a little bit of space. Speeds are great (10/100) and playing games and sharing the internet should be no problem

Having shopped around a bit I found that, for the money, this looked a fairly good product.

Set up was very easy once I discovered that my Cable ISP used the MAC address of my network card for identification. It was even easy to adjust the Belkin's IP settings to match my existing network schema.

However, I very quickly found out that, unless you update the IOS on the router from Belkin's website, it had a nasty habit of locking up the WAN port and disconnecting you from the internet!

Overall this is a great product and the built in 10/100Meg switch is fantastic giving really fast LAN connectivity. But, beware to upgrade the IOS as soon as you can.