Belkin Surf N300 Wireless N Router

 (37 customer reviews)

A lot of people have complained about the Belkin Surf F7D230 - the older version of this router sold in a blue/white box. I got the revised version F7D6301, which seems to work just fine for me.

I am replacing my good-ole Linksys WRT54G v1.0 with the Belkin Surf N300 F7D6301. Here are my comments:

* I bought it for $29 at Walmart on Black Friday, otherwise it sells for about $45.
* I did not use the Setup CD that would install a 95MB setup/monitoring program.
* If you have Windows 7, the setup is easy enough, just connect the power cable, hook up the router to the modem and you are set. The only other thing you need to do is to enter the preset password located on a small card on the side of the router. You can later access the router settings by entering http://192.168.2.1/ in your browser and set up a more convenient WPA/WPA2 under "Security" located in the left hand side navigation area.
* If you are not tech savvy, run the setup CD, it pretty...Read more

I bought this router to replace an aging wired only router as I now require a wireless router, (I still required a 4-port wired switch built in too which this unit has so it seemed ideal.) The model I was shipped is the F7D6301 V1.

There is a supplied CD containing a simple to follow wizard to install the router and easily change the most common settings, but instead I just set up the router through my web-browser, (the router defaulted to a local IP address of 192.168.2.1 when plugged in so could be easily administered through a web browser). After checking all the settings, (most were set to my requirements already, I just changed the SSID to something more specific to me to differentiate my network from a couple of Belkin wireless networks within range that had similar names, increased the amount of characters in the WPA/WPA2 key significantly for additional security, added a password to access the router configuration, and enabled MAC Address Filtering so as to further...Read more

1. No Priority Settings
2. Universal Plug and Play Option is Useless

Lets start with the positives. Setting up was pretty simple for me, took maybe 15 minutes. The signal WAS consistently strong for the first month or so. Thats about it for the positive.

Now the biggest problem I had with this router is its completely useless for gaming, worse, it prevents it.
I hooked it up to my XBox and tried to play some CoD. However I couldn't connect to any games because my NAT settings were automatically set to STRICT. I looked up the problem online and found that I need to change the NAT settings on the router.

Attempt 1.
The problem? This router doesn't have a NAT setting option.
Attempt 2.
I then saw that it had a Universal Plug and Play option. However, even enabling UPnP did NOTHING. Absolutely NOTHING to help with the NAT settings.
Attempt 3.
I saw that the router at least had an DMZ setting option. So I manually assigned...Read more