Belkin G Wireless Modem Router

Belkin's latest budget ADSL router, the G Wireless Modem Router looks like great value for money.

Forjust £35 you get a fully functioning wireless gateway with support forhigh-bandwidth ADSL2+ connections, four-port Ethernet routing andG-spec wireless connectivity.

Granted, even Belkin itself makesno great claims regarding the G Wireless Modem Router's highperformance prowess, instead styling it "perfect for setting up asimple wireless network".

So long as you don't need N-classwireless throughput, why pay more? At least, that's what we thoughtuntil we fired this deeply disappointing unit up and began to generateperformance numbers. The results are very ugly.

Ads-hell

Funnilyenough, the worst of the problem doesn't involve local networkthroughput. Granted, it pulls up the rear in our 1GB file transfertest. But it's only marginally slower than its closest competitor,Netgear's DG834G.

Likewise, it's not much worse than the Netgear when it comes to streaming high bandwidth video.

Theharsh truth is that neither of the G-spec routers does a great job ofthat. No, the really horrifying aspect of the Belkin's performanceinvolves broadband throughput.

Despite syncing at over 16MB persecond and therefore within around 1MB of the quickest routers here,actual download speeds were nothing short of glacial.

Wi-Fi orEthernet, the connection type matters not, you get essentially the samepathetic downstream throughput around the 2.2MB per second mark. Thefact that upstream performance at over 0.8MB per second is much moreacceptable is scant consolation.

In fact, so stunned were we bythe Belkin's catastrophically awful downstream broadband performance,we swung past our local PC World and picked up a second example. Longstory short, it was every bit as bad.

What's more, a quickGoogle scan reveals a common tale of woe from those unfortunate to haveto paid good money for such a substandard device.

In thatcontext, the fact that Belkin has bequeathed it with a tolerablybrowser-based user interface hardly matters. Nor, frankly, do otherniggles that we have, such as the lack of support for port forwardingor default access details such as the router's IP, username andpassword. It's all academic.

Powered by PC Format