Belkin WiFi Wireless USB Hub

Belkin has been my vendor of choice for years when it comes to USB infrastructure. You may ask what unusual is these days in USB hubs... they are so plain simple... Yes and no. As long as the hub works there is nothing to talk about. But I happened to have a number of USB hubs from other vendors and they were either sporadically freezing, generating a lot of frustration (for example when a long multi-page ADF document scan freezes after finishing some 70% of the work) or they simply did not allow to draw more than 500mA of power per port. Nowadays we have a lot of devices drawing their power from the USB bus. And many of them exceed the official rule of 500mA. I should say kudos to the USB hub manufacturers (like Belkin) or notebook manufacturers (like IBM/Lenovo) who save us on power supplies and unnecessary cords, allowing for current overdraft.

We have heard a lot about UWB (Ultra Wide-Band) and Wireless USB standards. They promise to deliver what USB delivers today, but without wires and over a short distance (consider having all the wireless USB devices on your desk to have them connected). While it sounds nice, I am not so sure this will be very practical... as most devices like flash drives or backup drives or USB CD-ROM's require power. The power is usually taken from the USB hub, but cannot be transmitted without wires, so there is hardly a point to have the devices communicating among themselves without wires, while they still have to be wired for power supply...

With the Networked USB hub Belkin takes a different approach. The hub itself is not wireless. It is a regular hub with five USB ports and a power supply... and an RJ-45 Ethernet socket. It connects over the Ethernet to your home or office Ethernet infrastructure and over the same Ethernet to your computer. Of course some segments of this Ethernet connection can be wireless, using standard WiFi infrastructure (be it 802.11 a, b, g, or n standard). So: on one end there is the USB hub, on the other end there is a computer, and there is just an Ethernet connection between them. To me this means freedom. I always go around the house with my laptop and the hub rests on my desk, being connected to a DVD writer, a printer, a backup HDD drive, a flat bed scanner and an iPod. As long as I am within a reach of my WiFi network, I can use any of these devices. Sync the iPod, print, access the backup drive. All of them use their standard USB drivers, so there is nothing really required to set up apart from the Belkin Network USB Hub Control Center. It behaves very well (even in Vista), allows to connect / disconnect the devices, even allows sharing them between machines on the same Ethernet LAN. The only downside is speed, for example the iPod/iTunes synchronization takes noticeably longer (but I run this over 802.11g network, I believe running similar setup over the 802.11n network would be significantly faster). On the other hand this setup gives a lot of "wireless" freedom and apart from setting the Windows firewall to allow TCP and UDP on port 19540 it is a piece of cake to install and manage.