Belkin PlayMax (5A80) Dual Band Router

Belkin PlayMax (5A80) Dual Band Router

Roydon Cerejo, Jul 14, 2010 1300 hrs IST

Offers good 802.11'n' performance, but its buggy firmware and software are problem areas

Dual band, guest account feature, decent range, does not heat up, file and printer sharing, two USB ports, small footprint

No status lights (only power), firmware has some glitches, software does not work correctly, unable to use any USB function directly through the router, a bit expensive

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Wi-Fi routers are no longer just about routing traffic and providing internet to your laptop, they have evolved into media servers, NAS boxes, file and printer sharing and to even download torrents, all of this while still doing its rudimentary job. The advantage of all this, you need less number of peripherals - like a separate NAS box or a dedicated media server - as the router will do everything for you.

Belkin tempts us today with their PlayMax 802.11'n' Dual band router that promises all the goodness we mentioned above. Since it's a dual band router it can operate at 2.4GHz as well as the less crowded 5GHz frequency. Thanks to the 5GHz band it should be easy to share HD videos over your home network. For security it supports 256-bit WPA/WPA2 encryption and for media sharing, it comes with two USB 2.0 ports that support FAT32 and NTFS file format. It also has a very nice 'Guest' feature that we'll talk about in a little bit.

The router comes packaged in an attractive box highlighting all the features.

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