D-Link DIR-655 Extreme-N Gigabit Wireless Router
by D-Link Systems, Inc.
|
List Price: Our Price: $73.99 You Save: $51.00 (41%) Availability: Usually ships in 2-3 business days Buy Used: from $44.90 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of D-Link DIR-655 Extreme-N Gigabit Wireless Router
Customer Review: Feature rich router
Summary: 5 Stars
First of all, there are a lot of reviews listing features, so I'm not going to list them all. It has a lot of nice features, more than most need, but as needs change its nice to have.
One suggestion for anyone, visit the manufactruers site, for this or any router. I did so and read the manual fisrt, it gives more inforamtion than any review or online sale page. This way you know exactly what features you will get (or not) and what will be required in setup before you buy. Also dlink has a nice forum, I checked that out to to be sure this thing was not a dud with lots of failures reported.
{Edit}
Review for Hardware version A4 - Purchase August 22 2009
{Edit}
I replaced a previous dlink model WBR-2310 that after two years of perfect operation began to lock up totally. I choose the same model but the second one had poor connectivity, even on wired. My computers keep saying the cable was unplugged and then re-connected. That second one also dropped wireless and reported one of my connections at half-duplex on the same cable that worked fine for over two years. So I decided it was time to upgrade to something newer. At the time I bought the first router I only had wireless-G and 100Mbps computers. Since then I've gotten newer items. My computers and my PS3's all now have gigabit. I also have a netbook with wireless-N and a LD blu-ray player with wireless-N. I choose this model because it could replace not only my old router but also a gigibit switch all in one box. Without changing any settings in my computers, and even switching back to the cable the other router did not like, everything is running smoothly again thru this router. Setup was a breeze taking less than an hour to go thru and set everything from scratch. I used the same IPs and wireless names I had assigned in my other router, and once put in all my items are back online smoothly.
Setup was much easier. One nice thing over the 2310 is that when entering DHCP reservations, you don't need to reboot, waiting 25 seconds, each time. There is a reboot later option, so you can enter all the reservations more quickly and then do one reboot after the last one, that saved me 13 minutes of waiting. The display is nice, as it sorts the connected computers by ip. It does not however sort the reservations listing, they remain in the order entered. It would be nice if they were sorted by name or ip making it easier to review what has been enetered, but that is only a small drawback. I enter them once and rarley go back to look at them. But when performing cleaup to get rid of old devices it would help if they were easier to find.
A bonus was the guest wireless zone. This is like having two wireless routers in one. I was able to set this up, still secure, so I can all guests access. It is isolated from my connection so the guests can't get into my computers. Very nice feature. The only drawback is you can't have the guest zone have hidden ssid and if you use mac filtering, you need to turn if off or put in the mac id when you have guests. I set this up so my house-mate can have internet access and don't have to worry about him having access to my sensative data.
It has good wireless range. I have it set to medium power and get 65MBps connection inside the house, when I go out on the front porch about 35 feet away, and thru one wall and one set of windows, I still get 56-65MBps and very good signal, 4 out of 5 bars still with the router on medium power. If I walk another 30-40 feet away the signal drops and the speed dropped to only 23Mbps, but I don't plan on using my netbook sitting almost in the road. I image it would be great if I had it on full power. My house-mate was able to connect at 65Mbps, where he preiviously was at 11Mpbs on another wireless system. He should now have coverage in his room, which is directly below mine, where before he mostly got no coverage there and had to come upstairs to the dining room to get coverage, on good days. I stream a lot of netflix either to my blu-ray or netbook and the qaulity has been great since the upgrade. I suppose the three antennas help with this, especially since they recommend you put them at different angles, not all three lined up the same way.
{Edit}
I Got even better performance by selection a set channel, instead of autoscan, and setting the channel width from 20 to 'auto 20/40'. My netbook connection speed increased from 65MBps to 135MBps.
{Edit}
I don't know what happens when you mix wireless-G and wireless-N, so far i've got 3 wireless-N devices hooked to it, but I do have some other wireless-G items I use occasionally.
There is a usb port which can be used for a shared printer or to use for a usb thumb bdrive to restore settings. Read the manual for that. Nice feature but I recently bought a wireless printer. I guess usb would be faster hookup but then the printer has to be near the router. I'm waiting for the ink supply to run out of my older printer, which since I don't print much is taking longer than expected then I think I'll switch to the wireless printer. But that port can also replace a wireless print server box I had gotten. So this is really 4 devices (wireless router,guest router,gigabit switch,print server) in one box with one power supply. It also supports 'green' where it uses lower power with shorter cables to computers and shuts off unused ports. You can even schedule times to turn the wireless network off, like when you are normally asleep or during work day hours to save power.
Someone mentioned the router overheating, no problem here. Even after streaming for hours. Although I have mine in a very well ventilated spot. I took the stand, flipped it upside down and it fits on the top edge of my lcd monitor, then the router sits on the actual bottom of the stand. There is not a lot of heat from the lcd and this allows good air flow thru the bottom of the router where the vent is near the front and out the top. I had my other router there over two years without problem. Plus it keep the lights within good viewing range and the hole thing out of the way. I used the stands from the old routers to hold other small items up there, like a portable slimline dvd and a usb hub.
I do agree the blue lights are too bright, even in the daytime. I have other blue light items so the blue color is not a problem, but these seems so bright, you can hardly make out the shape they are illuminating. A trick to reduce glow is tape a piece of white papar cut to size over them, it cuts the brightness down but you can still see if they are on thru the paper.
Overall I'm very pleased with this model. Most of the defaults had this working out of the box with little effort or time, it was only the customizing that took a little time, but was very easy.
Customer Review: The BEST Wireless Router with B/G/N and QOS
Summary: 5 Stars
Hello All...Happy New Year.
A bit of background...I am coming from 2 Apple Airport Extreme base stations which I could not tolerate after regular drops and continuous issues. I had regular disconnects...wired and wireless....and speed issues with bridging the second router. I therefore decided to go out on the hunt for another router that gave me the options I wanted and wireless N. I have an IT background...so options are a must. :-)
I bought the DIR-655 along with the DAP-1522. The dap for bridging purposes to the home theater.
The router setup was very straight forward....i plugged it in to our cable modem. Power cycled everything and I was up and running inside of 5 minutes. The first thing I did was go into the router setup via a web browser and make adjustments to the admin password...etc. Second thing..which is what I always do with new hardware is that I updated the firmware. ***NOTE - FIRMWARE UPDATES on DLINK devices erase the settings...so its a good idea to do them at once.*** One other thing to remember is that you can set the router up and save the configuration to your computer...this device and the dap-1522 both allow you to save the config...which saves time after an upgrade as it is easy to restore.
The router upgraded without issue and was up and running in a couple of minutes. I went in and created a wireless network, adjusted the dhcp scope, and voila....ready to go without any freaky tweaks or anything. Adjusting the DHCP scopes are not necessary for most..but I like to use my own IP address scheme and I do not like the default 192.168.0.x scheme.
Once the router was running I went to the DAP-1522. This was TRICKY...but that is only because I wanted to update the firmware. The easy part is press the button on the side of the DAP...when it blinks....move to the router and press the button on the router...you have 120 seconds. Voila both are paired and ready to go. If you change the DHCP scope this gets tricky as you cannot really access the DAP since its on the 192.168.0.x subnet... Simply put....dont change the dhcp scope and you can do the push button magic to get the DAP paired..then update the firmware. Enough about the DAP.... :-)
The router is functioning flawlessly and giving us better coverage then we had with the Apple Base Stations. I am getting about 68% coverage in my bedroom as compared ti 38% with the apple product.
Tweak Time - I wanted to prioritize all VOIP traffic for my OOMA system. Reason being..it is our primary phone and I dont want voice traffic to sound choppy. I simply plugged the VOIP device (ooma for me) into the router. Once it got an IP address I created a QOS policy with a priority of 100 and told it to monitor all traffic from the OOMA device. This will insure that the OOMA gets priority on the internet as compared to web browsing, gaming, torrents, etc... We have been using it this way for 3 days plus and asking people we speak to if voice is choppy....so far no complaints....ps..this was when we were doing some downloading on the internet. TESTING purposes only.
I love the ability to go into the setup of this router and adjust every piece of it...IF YOU NEED TO..... If you dont need to it will work out of the box and it will work perfectly.
The router has QOS services built in and they are turned on to Automatically shape bandwidth based on need. In other words...if you are watching a HD movie via netflix on the Xbox...this thing will make sure the xbox has priority. If you are on Vonage..this thing will make sure Vonage gets most of the priority so the calls are CLEAR. It works....and Flawlessly. Like I said...you can tweak VOIP....if you are nut like me...or you can let the router decide. It will work.
The only issue I have with the devices...the LED lights are ugly and bright... That bugs me a bit..but there are easy ways to dim the lights out....some tape, etc... :-)
I give this item a 5/5. I can write a whole lot more but it would not make for a healthy review. I love the product, the price, and the functionality.
PS...I switched from apple base stations that cost about $179 each...so price doesnt always equate to quality. Get this Router...try it out...you will be impressed.
Customer Review: Great device
Summary: 5 Stars
I previously had a Linksys WRT54G and was moderately satisfied with it until it started exhibiting signs of 'cheapness', like general flakiness, inability to load the web management (it'd load a blank screen), etc. After getting frustrated enough, and desiring a router with gigabit ports, I started searching, until I came across the DIR-655.
The first best part (and there's more than one) of this router was unpacking it. Honestly, it's the sexiest networking device I've seen in a long while. There's a button hiding stealthily on the right side, if you take note, but no mention is made of it in the manual. Also included in the package is a little black plastic stand, so you can stand the router on end - that's pretty standard for D-Link, and I like that. They threw in a Cat-5 cable, was that a joke? What am I going to do with a Cat-5 cable on a gigabit router? That's very amusing.
I elected not to run the software included on the CD. There's no real need if you know what you're doing. However, for more advanced users I'd recommend connecting the router to your computer, but NOT connecting to your internet connection (cable modem), and just spending a few minutes familiarizing yourself with your new sweet toy and all of her options.
Now for the good stuff: This router is amazing! The main 'Setup' page is basically divided into 2 parts for each section, a 'wizard' for quick-and-easy setup, and a 'manual' page. Basically, if you're a beginner, stick to the wizard pages. If you wanna get up and running fast, go through the wizards, you can always go back later and manually tweak the settings to your liking.
Connectivity is top level. I tested it by transferring 25 GB of large files then 25GB of small files between two hosts connected to this router, both using 10 feet of cat6 each. 100% success, no packets lost, no fragmentation, and the transfer was about 4% faster than the same transfer straight through on an unmanaged gigabit switch. Internet connectivity was great too. Thanks to the built-in SPI firewall, all the 'network noise' (thanks to all the other 'dirty' hosts on comcast's network) is effectively eliminated, and honestly speeds up my internet activity significantly over what I'm used to when using the WRT54G. Checking the logs revealed the dirty details of all this crap that's filtered out, and I like it gone.
Wireless-N connectivity was also good. Not much can be said here, it works like it should, and I have no complaints.
Administration is also very nice. As usual, the router is administered via browser, and while that's cool, I'd also like to be able to ssh into it and take care of business via CLI, but alas that is not to be. But otherwise, the web management is well designed, fast and easy to understand. This router also checks periodically for firmware updates and notifies you via email if you have the email settings enabled.
Other items of note: VoIP works flawlessly, as does all online gaming that I tried. Latency is noticeably reduced (on my favorite server, from about 80ms to about 60ms avg) in Half-Life 2 deathmatch. torrents worked fine. So far I have no real complaints about this router. It's now my most favorite part of my network.
Overall, I give this 5/5. Honestly, I'd easily say it's worth the price I paid for it (at the time it was $140), and for my network it is a perfect match. If you're a 'normal' computer user, don't buy this just to impress your friends; the features and complexity would be lost on you and are not worth the price.
PROS:
-DHCP Address Reservation
-Easy administration
-Quick Setup
-Email logs
-Incredibly easy port forwarding and per-application settings
-SPI + NAT + WPA2. Nuff said.
-Great documentation and help files.
-Port forwarding scheduling.
CONS:
-No SSH or CLI administration.
-Reboot required after changing most settings.
-No matching high quality D-Link cable modem to go with this.
Congratulations, D-Link, on crafting yet another incredible piece of networking equipment. The DIR-655 is worthy enough to sit on my desk, instead of crammed behind it like the Linksys was!
Customer Review: One Nice Piece of Wireless Equipment
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased the D-Link DIR-655 router as a Christmas present for myself (yeah, lame, I know, but I had to get one anyways). I went a little over the top with this purchase, opting for the more expensive Draft N over the current G format. In hindsight, it was definitely way over the top. For typical home users, most likely the maximum you will need is G, so it might be worth saving a few bucks and looking at a Wireless G model first.
But, this model still turned out to be a good buy. I have it set to N-mode only, so only laptops with Wireless N can receive the wireless signal. Very seldom do I actually perform a download that maxes out the wireless download speed, but from what I've seen during those instances, it has been performing at the 130 Mbps specified (or darn close). My roommate does more downloading than me and has said the wireless performs faster than his land-line ethernet (100 Mbps). So, given the positive feedback from him and my observations of its timeliness, I would say speed is terrific.
The range on this thing is absolutely amazing. In the days following its installation, I took my laptop on a tour around our apartment building after setting the router to mixed mode (for all B, G, and N receiving laptops, which has a lower transmission rate overall). Six apartments away, I was still receiving a signal that allowed me to check my email and other websites. I don't know if the faster speeds were maintained, but that signal penetrated through nearly a dozen walls. In my experience, I've seen Wireless G routers struggle to make it through a few walls, so this was quite impressive.
Installation was a little tricky, but not entirely impossible. Networking as a whole is generally a little cumbersome for the average person, but a few iterations through the instructions got it up and working. The router's browser page is quite organized and descriptive. This unit has a lot of features, most of which I have not used, but the typical home owner would probably not need half of these.
Some reviewers have complained that this unit runs hot. Unfortunately, I have to say that this is indeed true. It does not run hot to the point where I fear it will start a fire or burn my hand, but it does get a little warm from time to time. It is, after all, an electronic device, which are all prone to getting warm. There are little vents on the sides and top of the unit, so making sure papers don't get stacked on top will reduce any heat-related issues (an oops I've done from time to time). I have not noticed any drop in performance because of the unit getting hot, but again I'm not maxing it out continuously. I will say that it did begin to get warmer when my roommate hooked up and started exchanging a lot of data, but overall there has been no problem. If you're worried about heat, just do know that all routers, in some state or use, get hot.
Another reviewer commented on the flashing blue lights on the front panel being obnoxious. Yes, that is true also. Unfortunately, I keep this in my room at night and I don't have to worry about buying a night light to find the bathroom. I keep an office chair between my bed and it and have had no problems as a result. If you're not trying to sleep though, it actually looks quite appeasing in my opinion (similar to blue Christmas lights).
All in all, while this wireless router is far above the level in which I need, I am pleased with the purchase I have made. It has been in my possession for over a year and I have had no problems whatsoever. Some people may find issues for their particular case, but the typical home user or small office user would likely have no problems with this model either, in my opinion. I would recommend this product.
Customer Review: Smoking fast! Works with Windows 7...
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased this router last week and it has been up and running for 5 days straight. I wanted to make sure that it was capable of maintaining a strong and reliable signal for at least few days before writing a review.
Prior to this purchase, I was running the Netgear WGR614 Wireless-G Router. I did no prior research before purchasing that router, I needed to setup a wireless connection at home and I went out and bought the least-expensive model at my local electronics store. Fortunately, I was relatively pleased with that product. After upgrading the firmware (due to some initial problems), I was able to sustain a strong signal for months at a time without a reboot or reset. It performed well, connecting the sole wireless product I owned (a laptop) to the Internet at satisfactory speeds.
However, I soon needed to connect other devices (such as a Wii, Nintendo DS, XBOX 360, Sony PSP, and an iPod Touch) to the Internet. At first my Wii would not connect to the Netgear, and I spent hours looking for a solution to my problem on the Internet. I was able to find one, but had to change to very specific settings in order for the Wii to connect. (Only B, Channel 11, WEP). I was never able to connect a Nintendo DS or a PSP without disabling all security settings which I had no desire to do. I also was not happy that I had to finagle the settings extensively to get it to work with these very popular gaming devices. I also recently bought and iPod Touch and the connection was cumbersomely slow, to the point that a YouTube video would stutter relentlessly.
The last straw was when I realized just how loud that Netgear router actually is. It has a fan inside and that thing would buzz and buzz and drive me insane. I finally said "ENOUGH!" and decided to get a new router.
I chose the D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router because I wanted to "future proof" my wireless connection. My interest was also greatly piqued when I read that it has no moving parts inside (thus eliminating the noise from a cooling fan). It was a little more than I was willing to spend, but figured it may be worth spending more in order to get a quality product.
The setup was ridiculously easy. I used the CD which came with the product and the whole process was finished in less than 10 minutes. The connection is very fast! I am now able to view entire 10 minute YouTube clips on my iPod Touch without any stuttering. The range of this product is also extraordinary. Just yesterday I was walking my dog and upon returning home -- just before crossing the street in front of my house -- I heard the familiar "ping" of a new email message on my iPod. I couldn't believe I could get a connection from that far away! That was at least 50 yards from the router.
All of my other gaming devices connect easily and the router can actually identify them by product in the internal log. (For instance, when I connected my laptop the router's log read "LAPTOP" or "WII", etc.) The router's GUI is actually more refined than that or Netgear which is an added bonus.
All in all, I feel like I'm finally getting the most of my high-speed cable Internet connection. I'm just dissapointed I didn't get this sooner.
The installation also worked very well on Windows 7 Beta (RC), but that wasn't too surprising.
NOTE: This runs surprisingly cool. Like I stated previously, it has been running for 5 days straight and it's still cool (yes, cool) to the touch. This was a concern of mine because of the other reviews.