Home > Consumer Reviews > Belkin 10/100 4-Port Cable/DSL Router

I have had great experience with Belkin kit over the years. My Belkin 4-port KVM switch has run flawlessly for years, my 4-year old Belkin 802.11b WAP has been great. Everything seemed to just work, so when my 10 year-old Linux box, that I used for routing and firewalling, died the natural thing to do was to replace it with a Belkin box. After purchasing and then upgrading the firmware to the very latest version I installed it and came across a few things I consider problems that are serious enough that I can't use it. These are:

1) It only supports Internet Explorer for its web configuration. There is no excuse for not supporting Firefox and Opera. This is just lazy programming.
2) Whilst it says it supports IPSec passthrough, in my experience it has been patchy at best. One of the most popular corporate VPN solutions fron Nortel does not work with this Belkin box, though to be fair, the Microsoft Remote Access client does work.
3) There is a problem with running online games behind it. When playing multiplayer Team Fortress Classic, or Counterstrike Source, these games just lose their connection and choke. Despite changing appropriate settings for the DoS and firewalling features these still happened.

Afer a while, I got fed up and replaced the Belkin with a D-Link DI604 which worked perfectly, though I feel the web interface is less intuitive. The Belkin is an incomplete and sloppy bit of kit, which is a shame as I am a Belkin fan.

Don't buy one of these if you intend to do online gaming. It works fine for all my PCs but my xbox live connection drops whenever I start a game within 2 minutes.
I've tried : putting my xbox in the DMZ; completely turning off the firewall; and updating the firmware - none of this worked.

I plugged my xbox back directly into my cable modem and the problem is resolved instantly, so it's definitely something to do with this router.

The product description of this item states that it "Offers accelerated multiplayer gaming". This is misleading to say the least

Over priced and can't play a multiplayer game for more than 2 minutes before the connection drops... pretty sure it does the same thing with torrent as well, avoid at all costs[...]

Product does NOT support PPPoA used by BT Broadband. Only the detailed technical details give this information which, of course, most home buyers would tend not to view.
The setup eventually worked with Windows Vista OS but only after several attempts.
Belkin help appears to be based in the `middle east' area and is no longer a free phone number being a 0845 local rate number. They were honest and readily admitted the products failing.
As previously mentioned by another reviewer, the setup screen is IE based, Firefox can manage the configuration but with a basic screen and less intuitive.
A little more attention to the customer needs by Belkin then this would be a good general purpose router.

The device is very good, reliable and easy to use/ setup. It supports TCP/IP and I am sharing with other PCs around my home any file/folder I want and internet connection. USB connectivity gives easy installation on any PC / laptop.

Security of wireless though is still a big issue and you should setup password protected access to your stuff.