TL;DR – In short, avoid this router!!!
Preamble
I was suffering network dropping issues, and decided to see whether my Belkin F5D7230-4 router required a firmware update.
Update attempt
Irritatingly, the router can not download, or check for, a firmware update, if it is being used as an access point, and has no direct access to the WAN, i.e. no ADSL/phone cable going straight into the back of it. So you have to download the firmware manually:
- Updating your Belkin router’s firmware
- Finding the model, version, and serial number of your Belkin device
- Find your product
- Product Support
There are three main issues with Belkin’s support:
- The firmware download pages have no dates, so you can not tell which is the latest (chronologically) update;
- There is a version 9 AND a version A of the firmware.
It is not clear (from Belkin’s god awful website) if A comes after 9 (as it does in hexadecimal) or it is a pre-release build. See the page for yourself and scroll down to the downloads section. ;
- The firmware offered on the Version 9 download page, is v. 9.00.04, however, I already have 9.01.10 installed!
Whilst trying to google for more info on Belkin’s versioning system, I stumbled across this article, which is really rather disparaging!
Conclusion
Regardless of all of the above, after deciding to give it a go anyway and trying to upload the version A update, it seems to reject it (with the firmware upload page reporting Incorrect firmware image), so I guess I’ll stick with what I have, which is v9.01.10.
Advertisements