For far too long, I’ve been using an RCA cable modem with wireless transmitter as my router/wireless access point. There were a couple of problems with the unit, however. Firstly, it was an 802.11b wireless router, which meant the range was terrible - I had serious difficulties getting a signal reliably in the living room (the unit was in the bedroom). Secondly, what security settings it had would get blanked out whenever I unplugged the unit, which was often because it would freeze up every week or two. After dealing with this for over a year, it finally got bad enough where I felt compelled to purchase a new wireless router. At first, I was going to find something with known DD-WRT compatibility. However, in a moment of excessive frugality (I have these moments often), I saw a Belkin F5D8233-4 802.11n wireless router on sale at Walmart for only $70. Since there were plenty of Belkins on DD-WRT’s compatibility list (albeit not this particular one), I figured I had a fighting chance of getting a cheap, long-range, possibly Linux-compatible router for my home.

Initial Setup

Getting it set up was mostly painless, at least at first. Hook it up to your network like you normally would, insert the setup CD, and follow the bouncing ball. The CD, however, is only Mac and Windows compatible - it wouldn’t run on my Ubuntu box under WINE. I settled for doing the initial setup on my old iMac. The documentation you get with the unit is extremely sparse; there’s no information in the box on the LAN IP address, passwords, or anything of that sort. The online documentation at Belkin is marginally better, in that the user guide actually includes that sort of information.

One hitch that burned me for a while was that the Belkin would not acquire a DHCP address from my cable modem. After a bit of research, I found out that the default firmware on it (3.01.10) had a glitch in its DHCP client that prevented it from successfully getting an address from DHCP on a consistent basis. Fortunately, the latest firmware on Belkin’s site (3.01.14 as of this writing) fixed that. Since you need an Internet connection before you can download the firmware, I strongly recommend either downloading the firmware before installation of the router or, in a pinch, plugging a workstation directly into a broadband modem long enough to download the firmware. That said, I don’t recommend the latter approach unless you’re really confident in your resident software firewall.

Wireless Setup

Getting the wireless setup was largely self-explanatory. It supports WEP, WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK, just like any self-respecting wireless router of this day and age, which is nice. One thing that did burn me was the “Wi-Fi Protected Setup”, or WPS, which allows laptops to authenticate against the router with a certificate instead of a standard wireless key. Though my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn laptop was able to authenticate against the router easily enough, the same could not be said for my significant other’s Windows XP laptop. Disabling WPS caused the router to behave like a normal wireless router, authentication-wise, which was what I was looking for. With a little more time and effort, I might have been able to figure out how to use the router with WPS enabled, but I didn’t see the point.

The range was vastly improved over the RCA - where I used to get one bar, I now get three to four consistently. Better yet, the configuration doesn’t wipe itself every time the router restarts, which is also handy.

DD-WRT

Unfortunately, what I found online indicated that the F5D8233 was probably not compatible with DD-WRT or OpenWRT due to the possibility of it having a Realtek chipset. I haven’t had the guts to try it by myself, nor, at least at present, the inclination - it does work in its current configuration, after all. Belkin provides almost no information on the unit online, as far as what its chipset is or anything of that sort, which means I’d probably have to crack the thing open to find out what’s inside. For now, that’s not happening. I may change my mind sometime next week, though, depending on time and inclination.

Final analysis

For $70, it’s not bad. It has good range, it’s fairly easy to set up, and, with a little time and patience, it runs reasonably reliably and well. At least for now, I wouldn’t recommend it for the homebrew types, nor would I recommend it for those that aren’t already familiar with setting up wireless routers - it’s just not reliable enough out of the box for that. If you’re willing to spend a little extra, I do recommend going for either a more upscale Belkin or possibly even a Linksys. Think of it as something akin to a Chevy Aveo - you get what you get and that’s pretty much that.

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