If they awarded style point for networking, Belkin definitely gets the gold medal with its great-looking product lineup. This comes in addition to the company's long-standing edge in degree-of-difficulty scoring.

For this review, I looked at Belkin's:

• F5D7230-4 "54g" -- its name for 802.11g -- wireless/wired Broadband Router ($104 after rebates)
• The companion F5D7010 54g notebook card ($51 after rebates)
• Plus the wired F5D5131-5 Belkin 5-port networking switch ($42) to add on to the router's four included Ethernet ports.

Pictures may or may not be worth a thousand words, but in this case the ones on this supplemental page certainly will help tell the story. The Belkin units are sleek, low-profile, silver-and-black colored rectangular units with beveled and rounded edges. The look is carried though the company's networking product lineup, which includes access points, an 8-port switch, cable modems, and other standard components.

I suppose if you have your router and other network devices hidden away in a closet somewhere, esthetics make no difference. But if it is sitting out there in one of your rooms (or for that matter if you are obsessive about the looks of your closets) why have an eyesore?

Networking runs on industry-wide standards, which allows for interchangeable components. A Brand A 802.11g notebook card or Brand B desktop card should be able to communicate with a Brand C router, and also be backwards compatible with the older 802.11b "WiFi" standards. Both standards use the same 2.4 GHz band as cordless telephones; new chips and firmware that support greater data compression rates allow "g" to move data at 54 Mbps versus 11 Mbps for "b." Looks, convenience, price, and performance are the differentiators between brands.

There have been complaints of compatibility issues from time to time. However, in my testing with several brands of wireless units over the last few months I did not encounter any problems in getting them to talk to each other. And that was with interim 802.11 programming.

This summer the final 802.11g standard was promulgated, which should take the rough edges off the technology. All the major wireless component manufacturers have released firmware updates to bring their routers, access points, and adapters up to the new spec.

Belkin used the opportunity to make its router setup interface more user friendly and add a few minor additional features. First order of business for any user should be to make sure that the router has been upgraded to Belkin's latest and greatest (currently, v 2.00.04). The process is easy enough -- the update function is built into the web-based setup utility.

Ease of use was the hallmark of Belkin's networking products from the start, and it continues to be that way. You pop the setup CD into your PC, follow the wizard, and you are on your net. No muss; no fuss. I particularly liked the way the switch hooks up to the router with a standard cable through standard ports -- no confusion about whether to use an "uplink" port or crossover cable. Just plug the thing in.

I also liked the little touches: The switch is no bigger than it needs to be; the pictures here are not to scale -- it's only a quarter of the size of the router. The router itself comes with a solid, wide foot to allow it to be placed vertically -- and stay there without falling over.

I was amused by a recent comparison test, which said in effect that Belkin router was that it was the easiest to set up but came up a little short in various performance benchmarks. In my testing, I didn't see any weakness in wired data transmission. On wireless, Belkin components did not register as much signal strength as others but at no time did they fail to sustain a working link.

In real world use, most of us would stop right at the "easy to set up" point. Networking is a black art that can be frustrating to users. Typically if the setup works initially, you are OK. If it fails and you have to fiddle, it is a nightmare. While there might be some corporate situation where extracting every last Mbps is vital, most of us have a more demanding requirement: we want it to just work. Belkin's product lineup does.

(c) 2004 Al Gordon.
In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a principal in the Boston-area strategic consulting firm, Mary Fifield Associates, www.maryfifieldassociates.com

You can reach Al Gordon at:

al@tnpcnewsletter.com

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