Belkin Play Max dual-band wireless router

Router booster?

One sophisticated optional feature I haven’t seen before in a router of this class is the “cafe-style” guest account. Once this is fired up, anyone finding the Belkin Play Max in wireless range gets offered a guest portal web page. If they can enter the password you’ve previously set up, the router grants them internet access, hotspot-style.

Guest access is easy to allow

Visitors don't gain access to your LAN, as it’s on a different subnet - by default 192.168.169.255 instead of the main network default of 192.168.2.255.

And as long as your demands on the router aren’t much more than this, the Play Max delivers. Now you can reach across your network for any storage or printers attached to the Play Max’s two USB ports. The Play Max will also serve movies, music and pictures to UPnP-aware client devices like the Viewsonic VMP74 media player, reviewed here.

To feed the service, you can power up Vuze, the free software Bit Torrent app that Belkin includes on the installation disc. Vuze runs on your Mac or Windows machine, but its new “offline downloading” feature - still in beta - continues downloads on the router when your client machine is shut down.

Unfortunately Vuze, the commercial transmogrification of the the once great Azureus, now comes laden with ads that, for example, invite you to BeNaughty.com - “meet naughty people who live close to you”. Don’t like this? Upgrade to Vuze Plus for an extra 25 quid.