Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I am a Senior Network Engineer and I have been doing various things in designing, building, and fixing all kinds of networking equipment for about 13 years now. I have installed from scratch several enterprise (or very large office) class wireless networks. I use the Belkin Pre-N wireless router and laptop cards at home for a few reasons:
First to get the best benefit out of the Belkin Pre-N card you'll want to use it in conjunction with the Belkin Pre-N router. Then you'll want to upgrade the Pre-N router firmware (or software) to the latest version available on the Belkin web site.
1) The Speed - 108 Mbps (Mega Bits Per Second) which is faster than the standard 100Mbps Ethernet card in most PC's. However you will never really see this full speed due to the error correcting, radio interference, and overhead in the wireless protocol, but the Belkin Pre-N laptop card in conjunction with the Belkin Pre-N router will be at least 2 times faster than your standard 802.11G wireless cards (including the built in wireless cards in most laptops today). One thing to note you will only see the greater speed if you use the Belkin Pre-N card along with the Belkin Pre-N router. If you don't you'll only get the standard 802.11G speed (54 Mbps). The Pre-N designates a few things they did to double the standard 802.11G speed and it actually means the precursor to the 802.11N standard that was just recently ratified by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.) Incidentally Belkin now has the N1 wireless line which is compliant with the new 801.11N standard and can get theoretical speeds up to 300 Mbps (almost twice the Pre-N speed).
You can check your speed to the internet at www.speakeasy.net/speedtest. You should check your speed before installing your card (to get a bench mark of your internet speed) and afterwards to make sure it's close to the same or hopefully much better. If you find your speed slows down after installing the Pre-N card, you would want to look at what other wireless networks are operating near you. NetStumbler is a great free program [...] that will not only tell you what wireless networks are operating near you but it will tell you the all important channel they operate on. Ideally you want your wireless network channel to be 4 channels away (if possible) from any other wireless network operating near you. So if you see a wireless network near you (not yours) that is operating on channel 1, then you want to set your wireless network channel to 5 or higher. This of course gets really interesting if you have several wireless networks because 802.11G (Pre-N being an extension of that) only has channels 1 - 11 to use. So you just have to do your best to have your channel as far away as you can from all other wireless channels. Most people don't know about all of this and leave their channel on the default (channel 1) so you might be able to switch to the higher channels without many being there. The other thing that can slow your wireless network (or even cause you to get disconnected) is 2.4 GHz cordless phones. 802.11G (including Pre-N) and the slower older 802.11B standard (which operates at 11 Mbps) use the same 2.4 GHz band. I actually had to get rid of a couple of my 2.4 GHz cordless phones and buy some 900 MHz cordless phones (this was the standard before the 2.4 GHz cordless phones). The 2.4 GHz cordless phones are supposed to check for clear channels but many just go down the list from 1 to 2 to channel 3, etc because it's easier to develop the phones to do that. So when I took a phone call it would kick me off of the wireless network sometimes when my 2.4 GHz cordless phone hit the same channel as my wireless network.2) Range - The Belkin Pre-N card used in conjunction with the Belkin Pre-N router allows you to be much farther away from the Belkin router without loosing any speed or loosing your connection. Belkin boasts 8 times farther coverage than the standard 802.11G cards (like the one built into your laptop). And from what I've seen this is true. Now it may not sound like you need to be so far away from your router but the thing is, with standard 802.11G, as you get even 50 - 100 feet away from the wireless router (and especially as you add walls between your PC and wireless router) you may start to go down in your speed. The 802.11G wireless cards will start at 54Mbps and go down from there even all the way to 1 Mbps (very slow). I had this problem because I have a 2 story home with basement and my internet wiring is in the basement and therefore my Belkin Pre-N router is in the basement as well. I would then be working all the way on the second story (some 150 feet away) with several walls between my PC and wireless router and watch my wireless speed go down to 11 Mbps with the built in wireless card in my ThinkPad T43. With the Pre-N card in my ThinkPad, I maintain 108 Mbps everywhere I've gone, even outside in the yard. So the range benefit isn't just so you can go a block from your home and get wireless coverage but so that you can maintain a good wireless connection and good speed over it.3) Security - Belkin Pre-N supports WPA-TKIP, WPA-AES, WEP, and no encryption (clear). It's obviously unwise to have no encryption or clear because anybody nearby can see everything you send over the wireless network be it traffic to other computers, or things you send or receive from the internet (like your emails and website passwords). WEP is not much better and can be broken into when someone just sits in your neighborhood and sniffs less than 1 million of your network packets (usually less than 1 hour). Now having a stranger getting on your wireless network may not sound so bad but really it's like someone plugging in a network cable from their PC directly to yours only that you have no idea they did it and no idea who they are. So in addition to browsing the internet for free on your wireless network they can also try to connect to your PC, steal files from your PC, plant bad programs onto your PC, or watch the traffic you send to the internet from your PC and watch things like the login and password to your bank, etrade, etc go by. Give that some thought before you say you don't care if people connect to your wireless network. Therefore I strongly recommend you use the WPA encryption type and preferably set the Pre-N router to accept only WPA-AES encryption (the hardest to break of all of them). Once you set the Belkin Pre-N router to this, it will only accept connections of this type. You will have to come up with a long key (or key word) but this is one of the reasons why WPA-AES very secure. Along with that I would set it to 802.11G only so that no 802.11B clients (operating at 11Mbps) can connect. Running both bands causes more interference and again slows down your wireless network. I would also recommend you uncheck the box in the Pre-N router configuration that says "Broadcast SSID". By doing this you will NOT broadcast the name of your wireless network and people will not even see it when they browse for wireless networks near them. This is yet another hurdle to someone getting on your wireless network along with the WPA-AES encryption. You will know the name of your wireless network (and you should change this to something only you know as well). When you try to connect, you'll have to manually setup a wireless network in Windows and put the name in manually (not hard at all). Keep in mind only Windows XP supports WPA so if you have any other version of Windows (like Windows 2000) you would have to get special software for it to connect to a wireless WPA network. It's probably worth an upgrade anyway because Windows XP Professional runs quite a bit better than Windows 2000 or the other older versions of Windows. Again you really want to run WPA encryption. Also you'll want to set a good password on your Belkin Pre-N router so people can't connect to it and change all of this secure stuff you've set.
Conclusion: The install of the Belkin Pre-N wireless card works well and is fairly easy. The drivers they have for the card are very good also. The Belkin Pre-N router configuration is all done through a web browser and it works well too (as long as you upgrade the firmware on it to the latest on the Belkin Web site). So all and all I don't really have anything bad to say about the Belkin Pre-N products. They work very well, do what they say they can, and are pretty fast, and trouble free. They are priced well too now especially since the N1 products have come out. So as long as you're O.K with the 108 Mbps speed you should be very happy with it. But if you absolutely want the 300Mbps, then check out the more expensive N1 products that Belkin now has. This would only really matter when you are sending traffic PC to PC in your home and would not make much difference when going to the internet for anything. Remember most home internet connects are 8 Mbps or less anyway and your Pre-N card is at 108 Mbps. So the N1 products may not be worth the extra money unless you do a lot of PC to PC copying or something. But the benefits of Pre-N are definitely worth it if only for the reason that the greater range allows you to stay at full speed even if you're farther away from your wireless router.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Belkin F5D8010 Wireless Pre-N 802.11x Pre-N Notebook PC Card Adapter
The Belkin Wireless Pre-N Notebook Network Card connects your notebook computer to your wireless network with new Belkin Pre-N technology. It lets you share your broadband Internet connection farther and faster than ever.
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