Belkin Components -- the company's whose CAT/5 cables are probably at your superstore to connect up a home or small office network -- has plunged headlong into the networking components business. The big news here is that Belkin has put a heavy emphasis on ease of installation and use, making these networking products for people who hate fussing with network settings.

The components support full 10/100 Mbps networking speeds and standard networking protocols. At this point, I can only describe the pricing as competitive -- street prices have been dropping sharply and are fluctuating almost daily. Check your retailer for the latest pricing.

The flagship of Belkin's networking armada is its Wireless Cable/DSL Gateway Router (F5D6230-3) -- three Ethernet ports, plus an 802.11b "WiFi" wireless access point. (Below, left) The unit is intended to support broadband Internet connections. You plug your modem into the gateway's "WAN" (wide area network) socket, snap in CAT/5 cables to hook up to your PCs with Ethernet cards, and the wireless features support your WiFi PCs.

No desire for wireless networking? Then choose the 4-Port Cable/DSL Ethernet Gateway Router (F5D5230-4). (Above, right) It's about half the price.

Both gateways support 10/100 have robust firewall technologies to protect your "always on" connection from hackers. The wireless gateway also has five different encryption levels for your wireless transmissions. The gateways have the crucial capability to clone your network card's MAC address. This allows you to set up the gateway so that as far as your broadband ISP is concerned, it is still connected to your original card. This is a safeguard, not against hackers, but rather against ISPs that impose extra fees for plugging in a network to their broadband service.

At the other end of the connection, Belkin has a full array of network cards. Below, clockwise from top left: Desktop Network PCI Card (F5D5000),  CardBus Network Card (F5D5010), Wireless Desktop PCI Network Card (B5D-006), and Wireless Notebook Network Card (F5D6020).

Expansion options are provided in the form of a 5-Port and 8-Port Network Switches (F5D5130-5,  F5D5130-8) to add more Ethernet connections. You will note that these look nearly identical to the Ethernet Gateway -- they use the same plastic casing. Those circular dimples shown on the sides are actually docking connectors to allow you to snap together gateways and switches into tidy units.

Want to add 802.11b to an existing Ethernet network? Choose the Wireless Network Access Point (F5D6130).

If there are weak players in the Belkin lineup they are the USB 10/100 Ethernet Adapter (F5D5050) and Wireless USB Network Adapter (F5D6050). USB 1.1 only supports a maximum bandwidth of 12 Mbps, so while the desktop unit provides compatibility with 10/100 networks, the 100 won't happen. As for the wireless unit, USB and WiFi bandwidth are about equal, but I found the piece to be one the few that was a problem to set up.

Nothing is perfect, of course. I have a number of nits to pick. For example, no hard plastic case is supplied with the pricey wireless networking PC card to protect it when it is out of the notebook. The power cord connector, Ethernet ports, and one antenna are all crammed together on the back of the wireless gateway, where they get in each other's way. And, given that Belkin is a top source of CAT/5 cable, it is annoying that they don't supply short connecting cables with the two gateways for hooking them up to broadband modems.

I also would like to see Belkin, which has numerous products of various kinds for sharing printers in other situations, add a printer sharing module to the network. Users of the Belkin network are now dependent on Windows printer sharing. So if the PC to which the printer is connected is off, the printer is lost to the network.

But overall, it is a good range of products. And it passed the most critical of all tests: they work well -- and there didn't require hours of frustrating setup.

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You can reach Al Gordon at:

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