I've currently got the Belkin N1 Vision and it's pretty awesome. I got it when it first came out, and ironically prices have gone up since then! I remember picking it up for £70 and being astounded that a router could cost that much.

Anyways it's got most of the stuff I want - 4xGigabit ethernet, Draft-N wireless and QoS.

However it has issues.

For hours on end my internet will disappear - i'll have access to the network but not to the internet. Not very helpful. It used to be that every two hours the internet would drop for a few seconds, disconnecting me from everything (annoying for online gaming) but Belkin finally got round to fixing that (a year and a half later I might add!) Now this is just way too frustrating and i'm in the market either for a fix (preferable) or a new router.

Router would need to have decent wireless capabilities - It'll be serving 6 laptops, 2 xbox 360s and a PS3.
Router would need to have gigabit ethernet - it'll be serving 2 PCs, a server and a gigabit switch connected to 3 PCs and a Mac.
Router would need to have QoS - In such a large house you can't monitor how much people use stupid methods (P2P) to download stuff. I don't want anything to do with their downloads, especially notice them!
Preferably the router would have a function to assign bandwidth/priority to certain clients - We all use the server and it download [LIFTED] overnight, but one guy in my house refuses to stop torrenting which rapes our internet connection and kicks everyone off the internet and stops streaming over the network.

Any ideas anyone? =)

I "upgraded" to a Belkin N model last year, but within three days I took it back for a refund - without doubt Belkin are the worst pieces of cr@p I've (briefly) owned. It kept disconnecting, the indicator lights didn't function properly (requiring a restart at least once a day to get them functioning again), plus it wasn't backward compatible with my older 54b and 54g Macs (despite saying it was on the specs).

Just bin it and get a NetGear instead - I've gone back to my Netgear DG834GT and it's been working flawless for the last 5 years. In fact, despite only being a "G" speed router it's much better than the Belkin rubbish. I thought I was upgrading to a better router when I bought the Belkin, turned out to be a downgrade. Next time I buy one it'll be a Netgear.

This article makes for interesting reading on the state of Belkin's products.

If their own employees won't even use a free one, that speaks volumes!


At work we have a DrayTek Vigor 2800GT (I think), which is OK, but more for the techies out there - quite hard to set up, ugly as hell and you really need to know your stuff to set up the more advanced options. Saying that, though, it's been pretty rock solid for the last 2 or 3 years.

Yeah Belkin are terrible, but I could never back your review of Netgear.

Although much better than Belkin, their gear is still shaky. Our router has to be restarted at least a couple of times a week.

My Netgear takes a lot of traffic, often over 100 simultaneous connections for hours on end, and it never even slows down.

In the last 12 months, I only had to reboot it once. It's about the best router I've ever used, and that includes some very expensive "professional" kit. Even the wireless is solid.

I'm not a fan of Belkin, but like most companies their products vary from model to model and firmware to firmware. A lot of people are perfectly happy with theirs. For me, their god-awful website is enough to prevent me buying one.

Draytek's have all the features you need and have the option of bandwidth limiting if you want it

Well exactly, and that's why I use alternative firmware on our Buffalo at home. Here at uni my housemate who pays the Virgin bill likes to have control of the router, and doesn't hand the password out to anyone.

Well i've come up with a temporary (costless) solution, which will do until I move house. I think after looking at some Drayteks i'm definitely going to go for one of them! Bandwidth limiting > QoS

Anyways this is how it is.

Modem --> Oldschool Belkin G router
Oldschool Belkin G router --> Belkin N router acting as wireless access point for two housemates.
Oldschool Belkin G router --> Netgear Gigabit switch
Netgear Gigabit switch --> 3 PCs and server

Means the N router, if it stops working as usual, only drops two people from t'internet. And they can use the wireless G connection as a backup if it's down. Signals pretty crap in their rooms, and god forbid they want to use their laptops downstairs, but at least it works!