Product: Belkin N1 Vision Wireless Router
Price: $149.95
Rating: Two thumbs up; 95/100; A; ****1/2 out of five.
Pros: Super easy to install, fast download speeds, easy-to-use on-board mini screen and nice security features.
Cons: A little tall for some users’ setup.
Overall: A great investment for anyone who wants maximum wireless performance and gets frustrated checking connections through a web-based interface. A great buy.
As with so many things, your internet connection is only as fast as your slowest connection. It’s ye olde “only as strong as your weakest link” for the internet age yet the adage still rings dern true.
Enter Belkin’s N1 Vision wireless router, promising 300Mbps (physical) transfer rate and support for 802.11b, g, n draft 2.0 and 802.3ab. If that wasn’t impressive enough, it comes with a super convenient status mini screen.
After several weeks of use, Belkin’s N1 Vision is now my favorite wireless router.
Design – The N1 Vision ships with the router, a quick installation guide (4 pages, 1 sheet of paper), CD user manual, power supply and RJ45 Ethernet cable. The system has a pre-mounted base and is intended to be stood upright so the mini status display screen faces front and the connection ports (1 power, 1 Gigabit Ethernet modem port and 4 Gigabit Ethernet computer ports) are on the back. It also comes with a plastic Belkin tech support phone number card.
It stands 13.25 in tall, not including the three 2.5 in. antenna which, when pointing up, add 1 9/16 in. to the system’s total height. The face is 6 1/8 in. wide and the main body is only 1.5 in. wide although it is angled on the base which is 3 9/1 in. deep. Without anything plugged in, the system weighs 1 lb. 0.2 oz (460 g)
It has a shiny black plastic front with grey plastic base and back. Above the middle point, on the front of the N1 router is a monochromatic (blue) mini LCD screen with an actual display area that measures 2 5/8 in. wide and 1 5/16 in tall (approx. 3 in. diagonal).
Features – The router supports most known IEEE wireless formats: 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n draft 2.0 and 802.3ab. As with all Belkin products (and modern routers), once installed, there is a web-based interface that allows you to set up the router from a wire-connected computer.
The LCD on the front of the system works in conjunction with a five-button (Menu, OK, Up, Down, left and Right) control pad to the right. Pressing the buttons allows you to scroll through several status screens to check connection status, connection speed (download and upload speedometer), the devices connected to the system (wired and wireless), 24-hour usage listed by machine and a big ol’ clock with the current time and date. You can also access a Help menu and set the wireless Guest Access privileges.
It includes the usual security (WPA, WPA2, 64/128-bit WEP) as well as MAC Address filtering. As an added security measure you can also lock down wireless access for 20 MAC addresses.
Performance – Of the dozen routers I’ve tested, the initial setup for the Belkin N1 is the fastest and easiest router setup I have ever experienced. (I believe my initial reaction was something to the family-friendly extent of, “Holy crap, that was easy.")
Thanks to UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) and XP, as soon as you power up, with the computer Ethernet plugged in, your computer recognizes the new external device (this should also work with Vista and Mac OSes that support UPnP). You click on the balloon in the bottom right corner of the screen to launch a web browser window to immediately access the setup screen that is essentially 3 to 4 clicks: Pick an option, click, pick, click, pick, click, done. It is that easy and takes about as long as it took you to read it.
From there it’s a matter of getting devices connected as you would with any router and setting up your security. I’m a MAC filter kind guy, allowing only the devices in my house to access my network. That means either typing or importing a MAC address list into the filter section.
For the N1, there are two MAC address input areas. One is for wireless only which is a nice feature, but it only allows 20 devices, so you can forget this option for a large office situation where computers and other wireless devices might be connecting. For a home, that should be plenty (as long as you don’t own as many computers and game systems as I do).
The other MAC filtering, which allows or prevents any wired or wireless device, requires that you input each address one at a time. Between each address, it had to reboot the system, which is unlike previous Belkin products. For 20+ address, that means a 10 second waiting period between each input. Sure, it’s only a few minutes in the end but it feels like much longer when you have to do one at a time and wait between each “Submit” click.
Otherwise, this thing is fast. The tiny display on the router is rather nice, showing the number of wireless connections and the upload/download speed with a simple digital speedometer. It also uses the web to update the time.
Also, a nice little feature, if you ever owned another Belkin router and happened to save your password in your browser, it’ll still be there. Of course, the router won’t dig that until you actually set the password.
As for speeds, Belkin promises speeds of 300 Mb/s in 20/40MHz mode, although there is a disclaimer that states that is only the physical data rate and not the actual upload/download rates. I tested my speeds with SpeedTest and had my service provider open my throughput. With that, my max download rate was 3985 kb/s and max upload was 640 kb/s. That’s pretty impressive considering my service provider (Cincinnati Zoomtown) had previously lowered my throughput to solve issues with previous routers and DSL modems that was only allowing me to get a little more than 800 kb/s downloads and one-third that for uploads.
The only tiny glitch here is that the speed displayed on the mini LCD was actually slightly slower than the SpeedTest speeds, likely due to the screen’s refresh rate.
Overall – Of the more than dozen routers I’ve tested, this was clearly the quickest and easiest initial setup I’ve ever experienced. It was as pretty damn close to plug-and-play as you can get for a wireless router.
My only complaint was, when having to input addresses in the MAC Address filtering tool, I could not import a saved list (which I always have) and instead had to manually input each one and wait for the router to restart between each address. The 20-device limit for the secondary wireless MAC address wireless control might be a bit limiting for businesses and select users with a lot of devices who prefer to use MAC filtering although there are other security options.
It’s not an issue for me but, for those who like to keep their internet boxes on a tiny, narrow shelf, the N1 Vision will probably be too tall. of course, the slick design and mini, blue-glow display might be impressive enough to keep on your desk. That will also put the status screen within reach for easy access (assuming you are at a wired-connection computer set up near your modem, of course).
I love the status screen on this device. The convenience of being able to immediately tell the number and which devices that are connected is quite a time saver when working with many computers and game systems. The speed displays make that blinking connection status light on old and other routers look like, well, just a stupid blinking light.
Product Page [Belkin N1 Vision Wireless Router] Read [5ThirtyOne]
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