Tech Review - Belkin Wireless Network Products

Tech Review - Belkin Wireless Network Products Hello again, my name is Rodney Reynolds and welcome to another video review. Today, I will be looking at three wireless network Belkin products. I will be looking at three products here today. The first one is being the PCMCIA Card. This is basically the network wireless card which goes into your notebook. The other product here is the USB wireless network adapter. This simply gets plug into your USB port. They are very, very easy to install, and of course you would need to get all of these stuff to work, a wireless gateway router. Now, this basically is for both cable and a DSL internet connection. The first thing you really want set up here is of course the gateway router. Now, all this really does to make a very, very simple is you go from your DSL modem, the internet modem or the cable internet modem directly into this router. Of course plug this into the AC first. Once it’s powered up go from your modem whether it be a cable or a DSL modem right into here. And if want to have other wired computer systems out of this, you can. So, you can plug them here. Now, if you already have a wired local area network already in your home or office, that’s not going to be a problem either because you can go from that hub and you can go directly into one of these and then you’ll see it throughout the wired and throughout the wireless network. Of course, connecting the wireless to this, well there is no such thing as connecting it really because it would communicate back and forth wireless. Just to illustrate this and be very clearest to how this is all connected, we go from the internet modem whether it be a DSL or a cable internet connection right into here and of course you can plug other computer systems into here to share this cable or DSL modem connection of course as well as sharing files and so on printers throughout that network. Now, in our situation here we gone kind of beyond this in a way and we’ve actually connected another network which goes to a whole bunch of other computer systems that are on a different hub and basically what this does is it gives the ability from these two systems, the ability to share files even through this connection out of this hub. One thing that you to do is you have to go in though the gateway router itself and this can done by going into your browser and entering a number and this number is 192.168.2.1. Once you go on into the router you can set up things like your password, you can set up a security and all kinds of other things. I do have a time of course to go into this in this video review. But, it is very easy to set up and they do have a manual and of course they have information on their website as well at Belkin.com. Now, just a few things here I’ll just go over very quickly. Of course this gives you information about the internet connection which is currently connected, information about the gateway itself and of course information about this particular product as well. Now on the left hand side you can see here that there’s a few quick tabs. You can go into the initial set-up. This sets up things like you know, the Router’s Security, the wireless whether you want to go into encryption and things like Do Utilities. Now, the utilities here I’ll just go into this and in here you can basically reset the wireless router. Now, you might have to do this from time to time if you find that maybe your internet connection is getting a little slow or little bugged down or just not acting right, go ahead here and here on click and you can actually reset wireless router here without having to defeat basically unplug it from the wall and plug it back and against that’s a kind of a nice little feature here. Of course, if you screw everything up you can go ahead in here and actually restore to fact with default, so nice setting there and of course you can as well update the firmware on this which is very, very simple to do. Click here and go ahead you could download the latest of the website. You can see here there are no updates at this time but it does again make it very simple to do that. Once you have the gateway router all plugged in and configured, you want to then of course start to plug in the wireless products that you have into your desktop machines and your notebook machines. Now, I’ll be looking at the PCMCIA card here first and this basically is plugged right into your notebook like so. It’s very simple to do of course once it is plug in, it will go ahead and prompt you to install the drivers that are required, and there is of course software that is required here as well. As you could see here at the bottom right hand corner, there is an icon down here that indicates the connection. Now, I can go ahead and bring this up and this is the Wireless Local Area Network Configuration utility for the PCMCIA wireless network card. In this utility, you can see a few things, and of course what you’re seeing here right now is the Link Quality as well as the signal strengthen. You really want to keep this high if you want to have optimum transfer rates through the wireless network. Now something else in here that’s very, very cool. It’s called Encryption. You can have up to 128 bit encryption using a pass phrase. This pass phrase basically is a combination of words and those words first initially would have to be entered in the gateway router first before you can set this up on the other systems and enter the pass phrase right here to get the wireless network to work from the gateway router to the systems that you have the wireless card is plugged in to. Let me now move on to the wireless USB network adapter. As I mentioned before, you can of course connect this to your USB port and in doing so makes it extremely easy to plug this in and get it installed and configured. Let me do that now. I do have this connected now to a computer system and you can see there that it is indicating that it is connected and once you do have the driver installed as well as the USB Network Adapter Utility, you can go ahead and start using the web of course, as well as in your printers and files throughout the wireless network. As you can see here, I do not have any other kind of net card installed, any kind of network interface card for any other networking that would give me connectivity to the internet except for as you can see down here, the USB Wireless Kit, and here it is right here and you can see on the screen that we are alive and on the internet, and of course we could go ahead and just browse the web like so. And you can see here it’s very, very quick to do so and certainly it does make it very, very easy to set up and configure the internet, browse the internet, share printers, shares all kinds of files across your network and do it wirelessly. As an example, the network here now is set up. I have a lap top. I have also two other systems that are hooked into this wireless network as well as some wired networks which goes into our hub on that wired network so not only can you can see the systems there on the wireless network can being able to go into those dependent of course on permissions on those, you can see it all. You can see both the wired network as well as the wireless network. So, if you certainly have a wired network as well as a wireless network in your home or in your office, you can combined them both and of course get the real advantages from the wireless network on things like laptops or even in rooms that you don’t want to run wires and certainly that would help out a situation in a home or even again in the office. Belkin has really put together three great products here all these products were very easy to install; very easy to set up and overall they’re pretty secured considering that you could do a 128 bit encryption is always a good pay. Now, how far can you go with these wireless devices? Well, you can go around 1500 feet if it’s really unintruded with walls and doors. Realistically, well, maybe a 1000 feet and also the further you go away the more walls and doors if you have a deal with or even levels the less thing that you’re going to get and the less performance you’re going to get. Really I did do some test quite a distance away even outside the office and still was connected. However, you’re really going to get degradation in the performance of the network over all if you’re going really outside of that range or border line on that range. So, keep that as consideration when you’re doing this. Transfer speeds are around 11 mega bits per second on this wireless technology as well. So, over all certainly, a great product. Again, my name is Rodney Reynolds and this has been another video review. Be sure to check back very soon. I will have a brand new one for you then. Also, be sure to check my website at www.3dGameMan.com and while you’re there be sure to check up the forums. In the forums you can register. Registration is free you could find all kinds of information about this product and avail all the products which I video reviewed. Until the next time, take care.