Belkin N300 and Belkin N600 are two routers that are available on the market at very affordable and budget-friendly prices. They each is available for a budget much under a hundred dollars. However, the price difference between the two products is not exactly huge. The price of Belkin N300 is only some ten or twenty bucks lower than Belkin N600’s price. As the result, a lot of people are wondering whether they should pick Belkin N300 or Belkin N600 for the best value out of their money. Are you facing the same question right now? Well, continue reading below!
Single-Band versus Dual-Band
The most crucial difference between Belkin N300 and Belkin N600 is the numbers of wireless signal channels available in each router. You should be aware that Belkin N300 is a single-band router with only one 2.4 GHz wireless signal channel. On the contrary, Belkin N600 is a dual-band router, featuring one 2.4 GHz and one 5 GHz wireless signal channels operating independently and simultaneously. Furthermore, Belkin N300 only has 300 Mbps of total bandwidth for the single frequency, while Belkin N600 has 600 Mbps of total bandwidth, which is divided evenly into 300 Mbps for the 2.4 GHz and 300 Mbps for the 5 GHz.
As you can see, the increase in bandwidth – and, as the effect, maximum speed – is quite significant. If you want to serve several devices at the same time, having two separate signal channels is a lot better than having only one. With a dual-band router, you can serve more units with less network performance drop, since the bandwidth of each channel is less divided. This is especially very evident when there are gaming and streaming happening at the same time in the network. Provided that the tasks use different channels, you can have better speeds when using a dual-band router compared to a single-band router.
USB Port
The next difference is the availability of USB port. Belkin N300 has no USB port. Meanwhile, Belkin N600 has a 4-pin USB Type-A port, which can be handy if you want to connect a device or storage simply via USB. Each router also comes with four Ethernet ports.
Self-Healing
Another interesting feature of these routers is the self-healing capability. Both of these routers are able to automatically detect and resolve network problems, freeing you from the annoying and time-consuming efforts of figuring out what is wrong. The feature is not some magic that can completely free your network from problems, but still handy and useful.
Belkin N300 vs. N600
With only a relatively marginal price increase, you can get an extra wireless signal channel, more bandwidth, and a USB port. Hence, Belkin N600 makes the best choice here!
