The following is a detailed account of the ten hours of my life that the Belkin F5D7132 took away from me and that I will never, ever get back.
Over three weeks ago, I ordered a Belkin Wireless G Universal Range Extender in an attempt to boost the wireless signal from our new office (the old office is now the baby's room), which is on the far side of our house, to the living room, which is on the complete opposite side of the house. It wasn't until about a week and a half ago that I decided to open up the box and start setting the thing up. Unboxed, the device looked sleek and simple, and upon first glance I had no reason to believe it would soon become my arch nemesis.
Maybe if I would have read all of the reviews at Newegg and Amazon.com, I would have at least gotten a taste of what I was in for. At both of those sites, there is a very common theme: if you've got an unsecured wireless network, you're good to go -- if you don't, you're screwed. While you could certainly scour those reviews to get a good cross-sampling of all the issues, here's a list of some of the major ones I encountered:
- If you decide to use the little setup guide that comes in the box, you're throwing away an hour of your time. The thing is pretty much useless, unless you're out of toilet paper.
- In order to administer the thing via its web interface (which you must if you plan on using a secured wireless connection), you pretty much have to directly connect the device into the PC from which you wish to administer it, and then set a static IP address on that PC in a similar range as the device's IP so you can access the interface.
- Once you've accessed the interface, it's like sitting down to play a game of Russian roulette, the key difference being that in Russian roulette, assuming your aim is halfway decent, there is no suffering involved. The brainless scum who designed the interface thought to themselves, "hey, let's take a mix of ASP, Ajax and web development incompetence and create a nightmare for all our users!" And boy were they successful.
- If after days of endless pain and suffering (I'm not kidding) you somehow feel the mercy of the gods and get the thing to connect to and start extending your wireless network, you better hope you're using the exact same SSID or you're gonna see a bunch of "limited or no connectivity" warnings because of (I'm guessing) DHCP or DHCP server conflicts.
- If you really think you can get the thing to work with WEP security enabled, you're absolutely dreaming. If you actually get it to work with WEP security enabled, you're far more a man (or woman) than I will ever be.
The only reason I stuck with this thing for the ten (or more) hours that I did is that I read so many stories online of people who absolutely hated the experience (like I did) but still managed to get it to work for them after much trial, error, error, error and error. Unfortunately for me, I think I had much more error thrown my way than anyone else did. The story ends somewhat positively, though, simply because I gave up on running a secured wireless network and instead resorted to controlling access to my wireless network via MAC addresses.
The definitive guide on how to get the Belkin F5D7132 up-and-running seems to be this review from Chovy, but even that didn't work for me. Here's a rough rundown on what I had to do:
- Turned off the WEP encryption on my wireless router
- Restricted access to my wireless router by specifying only the MAC address of the Belkin F5D7132 as allowed to join
- Plugged the Belkin F5D7132 in directly to my laptop with an Ethernet cable
- Set a static IP on the laptop in the same range as the Belkin F5D7132's default IP address (the default is 192.168.2.254 so I set my laptop's IP to 192.168.2.100)
- Navigated to the web interface of the Belkin F5D7132 by accessing
http://192.168.2.254/in Internet Explorer (Firefox seemed to work, too, believe it or not, but at this point I wasn't ready to take any chances) - Set up the proper wireless settings so the device would connect to my now open wireless network, making sure the device's SSID was set to the same as my original wireless network (to avoid aforementioned DHCP issues)
- Moved the device's default IP address to an address in the same range as my wireless router (I changed it to 192.168.1.199) and then updated my laptop's static IP to an IP in the same range (something like 192.168.1.101) so I could still access the web interface
- Accessed the web interface again, this time restricting access to the Belkin F5D7132 by supplying the MAC addresses of both my laptop and Lando, since those were the only two devices I anticipated needing to access my wireless network
- Unplugged the Ethernet cable from the laptop, reset the laptop to obtain its IP address automatically and then cleared the original wireless network from its memory (to avoid any caching issues that might cause problems)
- Traveled to the other end of the house to try and connect with the laptop to the newly extended wireless network, finally achieving success
Among all the reviews I read of the Belkin F5D7132, I also noticed that there are quite a few people who've reported having issues with the device losing it's connection or needing to be rebooted fairly regularly. I'll have to keep an eye on that and see what happens. I'm literally at a point right now where the smallest issue could set me off on a tirade, but I do feel somewhat proud of the fact that I managed to stay patient enough to keep trying to figure this thing out even though I really should have given up a long, long time ago. It's a shame I don't have the same level of encryption (i.e. any) that I used to, but I'm hoping the MAC address filtering will be good enough for now.
Moral of the story: unless you're a masochist, don't buy a Belkin F5D7132, even if it means paying more for something else. That is, unless you're one of those crazy folks who has an open network and doesn't mind your neighbors downloading the latest episode of Lost on your dime.
Comments
Hey chovy. If you let me know where you posted those same instructions on your blog, I'll update the link. I wasn't able to find the same list of instructions when I looked just now. Thanks.
I've just bought one of these (September 2008)-- an impulse buy for our new garden office. The current version available in England now supports WPA, but frequent reboots are necessary (roughly twice a day for the three days I've owned it!). Your instructions, and others, were very useful. Still, it would have been easier, and cheaper, to buy 30m of external CAT5e cable. . .
Thanks for dropping by, Fairfax. I'm actually considering buying a whole lot of Cat 5 e cable right now and running it out of the wall in my office, under the house, and then into the wall out in the living room where Lando lives. It would be a total hack-job, but it would be so nice to have wired connectivity out there and get around this whole wireless situation I've currently got going.
I've now lost patience with this irritating little device. The latest version does support WPA, but only with 4-5 reboots per day, at least one of which seems to require a full reset. After accidentally dropping the unit, causing only cosmetic damage, I finally saw the way forward: 5 minutes later, a claw hammer had provided this unit's messy apotheosis. To be fair to Belkin, wireless extenders seem to be an unreliable technology at best, although that doesn't excuse their absurd, barely functioning, web interface.
I actually did not have problems setting the Belkin as a repeater for my Netgear WNR854T wireless N router (which was a replacement for a bricked Netgear Wireless N access point and used exclusively as such) as well as my DLink DIR-451 3G router although I do agree that it seems like it can't handle continuous operations and requires restarts every once in a while but not as often as most people report it to be. I usually had to restart about once in a period of one week to a month.
I'm not sure about it but the restart issue may be caused by overheating. I had the same problem with my DLink DIR-451 which disconnects me from the internet once it gets too warm I installed some fans beside it and now it works like a charm. It might work with the Belkin Universal Repeater as well but I can't really tell how effective it will be.
I also have another repeater, a DLink DWL-2100AP upgraded to the latest firmware to enable universal repeater mode which I was using until now. It worked fine (no damn restarts required) but now the power adapter seems dead. Just my luck. This meant I had to unpack the Belkin again. I hope it does its job better this time around. Only time will tell.
Oh, I forgot to mention on my former comment that I use WPA-PSK (TKIP) for security in my network. All devices are working fine including the Belkin which is sitting several rooms away from my room to connect my neighbor living next door to my network. The Belkin Unversal Repeater is also using a stronger and larger 8dbi antenna and not the default puny antenna that it came with, which could be the reason why it connects with ease.
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Your link to my blog goes to amazon instead :(
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