Manufacturers deliberately reducing speed?

Maybe I am paranoid, but I recently purchased a Belkin 7230 54G wireless router. It originally came with firmware version 1.0.0.1 and the only bit that worked was the wireless network side, the router had so many bugs that it was unusable. When operating at 54 Mbs mode, it could transfer data at about 3.5 MBytes per second. I have had several firmware releases since then which have helped but not yet made the router useable. However with each release the improvements have been at the expense of the wireless speed until the current firmware (version 2.0.0.1) can only achieve 2.6 MBytes per second. Now I don't know much about how routers are built, but two possibilities appear obvious, the first is that the manufacturers are loading the firmware with debug code to sort out the problems resulting in reduced performance while the second is that the CPU's that they have used are not up to the job that they have been designed to do. I would love to here other views on this, even if only to tell me that I am being paranoid!

Many thanks


Tim Lovegrove