About 2 months ago, my trusty Seimens Speedstream router died and I was forced to replace it. The result: A Belkin F5D7230-4 from Wal-Mart for $40. It setup quick, and after a few days I was pretty happy with it. This story is to update, and correct, those original statements.

About two weeks ago I started having intermittent disconnects on my cablemodem. As I have Vonage, it was screwing up not only my internet access but my phone line. It was an odd 30-seconds of operation, 30-seconds of disconnect, back and forth. I called up Time-Warner and after being bounced all around their tech support departments, they agreed to send someone out. Of course, when he arrived everything was fine again and he left without doing anything. Unfortunately, the problem keeps cropping up day after day with no explanation.

About two days ago I noticed that while my Cablemodem was properly maintaining the connection, the lights on the router were imitating exactly what happens during configuration changes, when it has to restart. For some unknown reason, the router is rebooting itself. After two days of digging around on the internet, I’ve come to realize that Belkin routers are crap.

  1. I am currently running firmware V6.00.10 on the router. If you use it’s built-in tools to upgrade the firmware, it tells you the “newly available” firmware is version 6.00.03, from about 18 months ago. If you go to Belkin’s website to download firmware, they list 4.03.03 as the newest.
  2. Apparently due to some marketing and advertising confusion, Belkin is offering refunds on selected models (mine included), but you have to have the original sales receipt showing price & sale date..
  3. Just visit the BroadBandReports.com Belkin Forum and see tons of complaints.
    1. Evidently there are multiple hardware revisions on this model, mine being V4002. Older models were compatible with the OpenWRT project, but the V4000 models use a different chipset and are not.
    2. Multicast crashes the router
    3. Certain MTU Sizes can crash the router
    4. Establishing over about 200 connections kills the router, sometimes rebooting it (I think this is my problem). BitTorrent is a major router-killer because of all the parallel connections, and I think my Vonage unit just compounds the problem.

From reading around the net, it seems that Belkin Support is pretty clueless on the whole thing. They’ve apparently released a new V5000 of the hardware with V7.00 firmware, but I can’t find it for download anywhere (Not that it would probably even work). So essentially, it seems as though this unit is already “antique”.

So my advice to everyone reading: Avoid this router. I’m stuck with it at least in the short term, but I’m probably going to have to replace it.

Update: 7/6/2006
This article gets alot of traffic it seems, and I just got the following email that I thought would be useful to anyone else with similar problems.


Read your article, having the same problems here with my F5D7230.

Contacted Belkin Europe, they’re swapping mine for a F5D7235 free of charge.

There are known problems with several series of the 7230 whereby the router crashed and the LAN ports turn up orange, and the power LED turns off.

Belkin told me it is a combination of bad power supply’s and power dips in the voltage regulator inside the router. The crashing ones also get too hot resulting in “weird regulator behavior”, which then resets the router…

Thought you would like to know…


So.. If you’re having trouble, give Belkin a call and maybe you can get a Freebie replacement. I can’t honestly tell you if it’s a good deal or not, since the F5D7235 doesn’t seem to be for sale on either NewEgg or ZipZoomFly.
[tag:hardware][tag:belkin][tag:f5d7230][tag:review][tag:router]

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