Review: Belkin Surf N150 router

Belkin seems to change its model design pretty radically every year, and 2011 is no exception. The Surf N150 is the base model in the new range, costing about £30 for the cable model I looked at. It's an 802.11n single-stream model (150Mbps) with four 100Mbits/sec LAN ports plus a WAN port, and features Belkin's new Multibeam antenna technology to improve range.

This seems to work very well, although I'm still unsure of the exact technical details - Belkin just says, rather unhelpfully, that the coverage pattern is 'apple-shaped' rather than 'doughnut shaped', and that its antennas use a 'slot design for higher gain', which sounds like another way of saying it has a high-gain antenna design. The N150 only has two internal antennas, so it can't use beam-forming (that is found in the more expensive models, though). It did give excellent range in my tests, as you can see in my full review for Computeractive.

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