Customer Reviews

Belkin F5D8010 Wireless Pre-N 802.11x Pre-N Notebook PC Card Adapter

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

This is a great card. Bundle it along with the MIMO Pre-N router, #F5D8230-4, for an awesome, long-range, high speed wireless solution. I have been through standard wireless Dlink components (Router & Laptop card)and have been frustrated with the short range limitations in my two story house. Excellent reception now where I had lttle prior to the switch. This investment is certainly worth the investment. Also, the review that states "this wireless card only works in a Cardbus slot, not a PCMCIA slot." is not something most people should worry about. The Cardbus slot IS a PCMCIA slot, but a 32-bit extension. It is also known as "Type 2 PCMCIA card". Most notebooks manufactured in the last 6-7 years are equipped with this slot.

I had originally purchased a Linksys WRT54GX router along with the companion SRX wireless PC card because: 1) I wanted to replace an 802.11b wireless network in my 2-story home for better coverage (I was having to use a Linksys wireless access point in repeater mode to get "complete coverage" with the old setup); and 2) I wanted a faster wireless network.

I quickly became frustrated with the new Linksys SRX wireless setup, primarily because my laptop (a 2004 HP model) wouldn't always detect the wireless card after powering up from sleep mode, and often there would be dropouts in my wireless internet connection, even when my laptop remained stationary. In addition, even though the wireless icon in the task bar would constantly indicate a connection speed of 108.0 Mbps, it was obvious that my new wireless internet connection was often far slower than even my old 11.0 Mbps wireless network connection! This problem was especially obvious with websites rich in photo-quality graphic images, like ESPN.com.

So, I contacted Linksys tech support and, with the help of a friendly tech support agent, reprogrammed several parameters on the router. The problem improved, but only temporarily. Frustrated, I returned both the wireless router and the PC card and immediately ordered the Belkin Pre-N router and PC card (based on Cnet reviews, which rated the Belkin system higher anyway).

Both the Belkin wireless router and PC card installed quite easily with the accompanying installation CD's and my system has been up and running without a hitch--so far. One other thing I have liked about the Belkin system is that (using the included Belkin Wireless Client) it displays realtime send and receive speeds of the wireless card, which are often slower than the 108.0 Mbps the wireless icon in the taskbar is constantly pegged at; but at least I know the "true" speed of my wireless network at any given point in time (the measured speeds that are displayed are constantly changing and fluctuate mainly according to distance from the router).

Needless to say, I have been impressed with my early experience with this Belkin system and won't hesitate to highly recommend it to others considering a future home wireless network upgrade. Oh, and did I mention that the Belkin system was cheaper than Linksys'?!!

Wow!! The Pre-N works great. I spent hours reading and rereading the reviews for the Pre-N router and PC Card adapter before purchasing. I first purchased a router that claimed to have a 200 foot range, but it didn't. So I decided to gamble with the Pre-N despite the added cost and the mixed reviews. It is awesome!
Installation was a breeze. Although some reviewers reported trouble with the compatibility of the adapter, the Pre-N adapter for my Toshiba laptop has worked just fine.
I have two houses on my property about 60 feet apart. The internet cable is connected on the second floor of the back house. I wanted a wireless internet connection in the front house. The distance from the router is 125 plus feet. The signal has to go through the walls of both houses and downstairs. No problem! I get a good signal with a steady speed of 108Mbps. That puts my old telephone modem to shame.

After being frustrated with wireless networking on a notebook computer with the old Linksys system in our house, the Belkin notebook card works effortlessly! Our old system had our notebook computer off-line more than it was on. After the quick installation of this notebook card into our Dell Inspiron notebook computer, it works 100% of the time. We have the Belkin Pre-N Router as well. The system is well worth the money.

I purchased both the Pre-N router and wireless card. Setup of the router was a breeze with no major issues, but when I tried to install the card the installation program took a half hour to install the drivers and client utility. Once I got everything setup I was getting a 97% signal from my router, but no Internet connectivity. If I was hooked up to the router via ethernet cable I was fine, but the card just wouldn't work. When I called tech support the first time (on hold for 15 minutes) they told me that the driver the CD installed was old and that I needed to go to their website to download the right version. So I did that...still nothing. I call tech support again (this time I don't know how long I was on hold because I literally fell asleep waiting). This time they looked all over my computer and basically told me they couldn't figure it out so I better mail it back to J&R so that they can look at it. Luckily I'd bought two cards and found that I was having the same problem with that one. Four hours later after uninstalling and reinstalling the software multiple times it just started working. I really have no idea what I did. So far it's working fine, but man that was painful!

Just installed it following the directions from a previous review on this site...THANKS. Its fast! The card DOES SUPPORT WPA ENCRYPTION, just don't install or use the Belkin connection utility. Only install the drivers then cancel and let XP handle the connection. You plug your encryption key back into windows network connection manager when you connect and you are good to go. Have used several newer and supposedly fast adapters and this one smokes them on speed and range. Belkins website says that they were out of stock due to popularity of the product so you would think that they would get the message, pump out more of these and upgrade their software to take advantage of the higher security encryption.

I had read on several sites that this card did not work well with Dell computers. However, if you follow the instructions on Belkin's website for installation with Win XP, it takes about 2 minutes to set up and works great! Download the software from Belkin's website (don't use the cd that comes with the card,the software is already outdated). Disable your internal card. Install the software up to the point where the drivers are installed, but hit "cancel" when it says it will install the Belkin Client Utility. Exit the installation. Make sure you have Windows Zero Wireless Configuration enabled in your services. Open your network, add back in your encryption key (I use WPA-PSK, TKIP) and you are up and running! No issues with WPA, no issues with the card at all.
And the speed is excellent! Highly recommend.

I bought the "Pre-N" router and adapter card because we tried a Linksys G system and the range just couldn't make it through the walls in our house (we live in a old plaster-walled 2 story bungalow).

We wanted to be able to connect a laptop via wireless to our existing hard-wired network as well. The combination of the Pre-N router and Pre-N adapter card does the job admirably. We use a laptop mostly in our main floor living room to look up internet stuff, but our "office" is on the second floor with it's hardwired connections.

I have tried getting a signal in the farthest corner of the basement and it comes through with no problem.

I highly recommend this Pre-N router and adapter card combination. As of this writing, the best deals I've come across (retail, not internet-I'll always buy this type of technology retail as it lets you try to out in your home to make sure it connects with your system and gives you the range you need) is $100 for the router, and $70 for the adapter card.

I couldn't get the pre-n card to work with Belkin's Wireless Client Utility software either. I called tech support. The lady was very kind and patient. We rebooted, uninstalled, reinstalled ect but to no avail. She said someone would call me within the next 48 hours. That time has not yet elapsed. I already had Boingo on my laptop but I had trouble getting a web page up until I replaced the Belkin pre-n card with my old Linksys 54G card. I was able to pull up web pages. I went to Cnet's bandwidth meter at http://reviews.cnet.com/7004-7254_7-0.html and found I had the same speed as Tech Addict described--above T1 and below T3. Then I replaced the Linksys card with the Belkin pre-n card. For some reason, I was suddenly able to pull up web pages via Boingo. My connection with the Belkin card was the same as Tech Addict's--above T1 and below T3.

I wonder if I need the Belkin card since I get the same results with my old Linksys 54g. At school, my connection with the Linksys card is rather poor. If the Belkin pre-n card performs better there, I will want to keep it. I've heard that institutions often use b routers and that g cards might not perform well on such networks. I was going to buy a cheap b card for school, before I found out about Belkin pre-n performance. It appears that I have some more investigating to do.

When Belkin's tech support calls, I'll tell them about Tech Addict "Mark"'s comments. Hopefully they are already aware that there is a problem.

I forgot to mention that I had called Belkin's tech support previous to the above mentioned incident, and a lady there helped me get up and running including the Client Utility. But, thereafter, my computer crashed for some reason. When I rebooted, the Client Utility kept telling me that it couldn't find my adapter-Belkin card. My computer had recognized the card and so had the Boingo program, but after repeated attempts, Belkin's Wireless Client Utility software never found its own pre-n wireless adapter.

If you are replacing your router, by all means buy the Belkin pre-n F5D8230-4. Try it with your old wireless card before you buy Belkin's pre-n F5D8010 card, unless you know that you want a new card.