What it would look like if I got too close

I bought a new ADSL router at the weekend. I am not that impressed, but it will have to do for the moment since there does not seem to be anything better around. Rubbish.

I got a Belkin N+ (F5D8635) mainly on the basis of fairly sound reviews and a feature that enables you to plug in a USB hard drive so that you can share media such as music or films across the network. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work as expected, more on that later.

The set-up process was unnecessarily arduous, given that the software supplies asked you for your ISP so that it can auto-populate settings. Typically my ISP was not listed, and so I selected “other”, but this then meant that the screen to enter the ADSL username and password was missing so I ended up having to abort the connection process and set up things manually.

Once things were up and running I tested the internet and all appeared fine. I ran a speed test and saw a good 20% increase in download speed, although I attributed this mainly to the fact i removed a lengthy phone extension cable in the process of setting up and this must have improved the connection. Despite this theoretical increase in speed, the internet was still being a bit weird. Websites stalled when loading and the status bar just displayed the dreaded “Contacting Google…” etc. I am still monitoring this, given that there seemed no reason for it.

Next I set up the USB hard drive, which was the main reason for getting the router in the first place. Set-up was simple using the included Storage Manager software, although I later realised that this was unnecessary and I could connect to the drive via a SMB share along the lines of smb://[ipaddress]/[HDDName]. I copied some large files over and it looked like the transfer rate was about 1MB/s, not that great given that the router has a headline speed of much faster due to the draft N standard it connects over. This should be enough for streaming video and music and so next I tested that.

Video, both hi-definition and standard seemed fine. Music was a much bigger problem to test, seeing I had to rebuild my itunes library due to the different path to the music. I really should have just done a search and replace in the library XML file, but didn’t think of that at the time. Idiot. Adding the files took ages and crashed itunes due to the annoying file scanning that itunes does, which can neither be run in the background or stopped. Once the music was in place there was a slight delay in selecting songs and sometimes the music cuts out. Annoyingly I am not sure why this is, since most of the time it is ok. I think it may be more to do with the OSX implementation of the SMB protocol than anything else, but my investigations continue.

Either way, I now do not have to plug in the hard drive directly to the laptop to listen to music and it can be streamed directly through the router to the airport express connected to the amp. All I need now is a reliable way of streaming from Safari or Quicktime. Airfoil by the curiously named, Rogue Amoeba seems to just crackle and hiss when I attempt to use it to stream any sound outside of itunes to the airport. Also did some investigation to see if I could stream directly from my iphone to the airport, but it doesn’t look like anyone has worked that one out yet. It seems like an obvious application or upgrade that even Apple should make to their “Remote” software.

Other things of note that I didn’t seem to find elsewhere is that it comes with this rubbish plastic stand that is moulded to the base, ie you can’t remove it. This means you have to have this black flickering gate to the internet upright and it is more difficult to hide it away somewhere. This also reminds me, why all the flashing blue lights on the front. Belkin had added a series of “icons” to represent various goings on in the innards of this thing. I presume to give the idiots something to stare at once they get bored of ITV2, but for me these are a little annoying.

Eco features. Yes this router has eco features. WTF?