Belkin F9K1106 Dual Band Range Extender

 (33 customer reviews)

With gadgets galore surrounding our everyday lives we are often confronted with those that just will not work and it is usually because of operator error. But, and that is one real big but, when I hooked up the Belkin Dual Band Range Extender I was oh so pleasantly surprised. It worked and worked exactly as it should have. When the instructions say do this and do that and then hit go it was all go from the beginning. I took it to my "man cave" (that's code for garage) and used it as my midpoint to see if the weak signal from the router would give it some additional range. It did and with ease. The first time I tried to extend my laptop and Duo into the garage without the Belkin I got a medium to no signal but with Belkin it was go at the gitgo. I took the laptop to a next door neighbor's house and it still worked. Now I have my own neighborhood network. If you saw where I lived you would laugh at that. There are still more cattle than people in the neighborhood and most of...Read more

What sets this Wi-Fi range extender apart from other ones is the ability to extend both 2.4 and 5 GHz band Wi-Fi networks and it does that as claimed; and it works with all three 802.11 a. b. g and the n standards. 5 GHz has a much shorter range in distance and so is the extension for this band, barely 15 feet or so. 2.4 GHz extension is about 20 feet or thereabouts in my house, but it can vary depending upon the walls and other devices using 2.4 GHz band in your house. I have used it for only a short amount of time and have not experienced the disconnection problems other users are reporting.

The 2 page manual can be a little more clear in stating that you should disconnect the computer from the W-Fi network before connecting this range extender to the ethernet port of your computer for set up. Otherwise the unit is easy to set up and is not bad looking. As of December 2011, the user guide is not available for download from Belkin web site. These are the steps;...Read more

I have two PC's at home: one is directly connected to the gateway and the other is connected via the WIFI network. You cannot use a directly connected PC to set up this Belkin WIFI extender. To me it seems ridiculous that you need to connect to anything to set up an extender. I did no such thing with the Cisco Bridge that I currently use. There is no mention of needing to utilize an already connected WIFI unit until you get into the set up guide.

Once I figured that out and connected it to my wife's PC, the installation went flawlessly. I placed the Belkin unit in an area that is difficult to obtain a signal - hence the previous Cisco Bridge product - and it worked great. I downloaded a movie from Amazon Prime and no problems. So I've replaced the Cisco bridge for now in order to test the unit over more time. I will update this review if anything develops.

The reason for replacing the Cisco with this unit is that the Cisco has only one port for only one...Read more