D-Link DIR-655 Extreme-N Gigabit Wireless Router by D-Link Systems, Inc.
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Digital camera reviews of D-Link DIR-655 Extreme-N Gigabit Wireless Router
Digital camera Review: A featureful well-designed device!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have to agree with the many positive reviews here.
I've been a long-term Linksys user. Recently I noticed a decline in the overall quality of their product line. I'd been using a third-party firmware as well to increase/tune performance, ultimately finding it wasn't worth the bother.
I decided to look to amazon.com customer reviews for better recommendations.
Here I found the D-LINK DIR-655, which received the most positive reviews.
I was surprised, as I'd always associated D-LINK with lower-end products, for some reason. Don't let the price deceive you; this unit is packed full of features that actually work very well.
The device was easy to set up. I use a Mac and didn't need to use the disc-based setup; rather the default web page has a similar tool to get you started. It does a very good job at warning you about the need to reboot, allowing you to postpone. They've coded their web pages such that it will automatically refresh to the rebooted unit. Very smoothly done.
People have complained here that the default router address is 192.168.0.1 versus 192.168.1.1 -- clearly they haven't read the manual, as you can change this in the router configuration! Please people, read the manual before you post negative critique.
Yes, the LEDs are very bright! I placed this on top of my television, as that's where my cable modem resides. It is a bit distracting, like a mini disco :-) I put it behind the TV for now. It would be nice if they had some adjustment to lower the power on the LEDs.
The only problems I ran into were trying to find the obvious place to set the wireless security. It starts up as password-less access point, which provides open access. At the moment I brought it online, I already found someone in my building connected, leeching off the wireless, so I disconnected him, set the WPA2 security and rebooted.. It's very important that you set the router password and establish WPA2-only security.
I also recommend that you select to "hide" the unit, as in not broadcast the SSID. This setting is available in the D-LINK settings -- normally we would expect to see "Broadcast SSID?" but D-LINK has this as "Hide?" Keep note of that.
In that regard, I think the interface could be more intuitive in putting the most important things (like security) in the obvious front part - or even as a part of the configuration wizard. However, I'm also very used to another configuration entirely, so it could be just me that needs to adjust.
In any case, the features provided are enough to satisfy both the basic and advanced users. The logs display in a screen that can be refreshed, there's an SPI firewall and many other useful tuned features you can work with which I'm still discovering.
I would like to have more flexibility with the SPI firewall to block certain specific addresses and ranges - I'm not sure this unit can perform that.
All in all, I couldn't be happier. This is a well-designed device. It's clear to me that whomever designed the features and interface really put a lot of thought into it.
5 Stars!
Digital camera Review: A great router
Summary: 4 Stars
I purchased this router as an alternative to my aging 802.11g router by Zyxel. My old router had served me well but was limiting my broadband speed in ways I hadn't realized until I switched to cable broadband.
The D-Link router is great!! I get much higher throughput from direct internet connection through the router for my desktop machine as well as very speedy wireless connection on my notebook. It is easy to configure and has not caused me any troubles. I am currently running firmware 1.21 without incident. I highly recommend this router if you don't need the latest dual band capability. I tried one of those (a D-Link 825 if I can recall correctly) but took it back as it was overkill-- a features set I wasn't going to use, too hard to configure properly, and more expensive than the 655.
Digital camera Review: A great router!
Summary: 5 Stars
I connected this router to my home network in just a few minutes. Easy as pie. I have two WIN 98 PC's, one XP notebook, one Vista PC, one MacBook Pro, one iMac and a PS3. I am mixing 'N' with 'G' and so far it works great. If I encounter any problems I will update this review.
I did use a cable to connect one of my WIN 98 machines but from what I've seen I don't need to wire any PC to the router to get it to work just fine. I did install the included software on this PC with ease.
I tested the internet speed on each PC and it is by far faster than my old 2WIRE DSL modem/router that up and died on me.
I highly recommend this router. Fast and easy to install.
Digital camera Review: A great unit when things go right
Summary: 4 Stars
I have been using the D-Link DIR-655 for just a few days. Initial installation APPEARED to go smoothly and the unit worked OK for Internet access but there were some strange problems when I tried to do Remote Desktop Client access over the LAN. Automatic backups were getting skipped because the backup program could not find the server. I put my old router back in service and the problems vanished. As I investigated, I discovered that there was something truly strange going on in the handling of NetBIOS on the LAN. I tried a restore to factory defaults and re-did the installation. After the reset to factory settings the installation wizard would not run properly so I had to do the installation manually. This time it worked, and the router is functioning just fine. There were no recurrences of the odd problems on the initial installation. The only real problem I had with configuration the second time around is that for some reason the router did not want to accept the time zone/daylight setting information.
So, the good news is that this is a fast router. Once it is properly configured it seems to work great. Range is better than my old router, and I haven't had any connection problems with connections using any of the wireless protocols.
I have not owned the router long enough to comment on durability or long term stability, and I have not used the USB port so I don't know anything about its functionality. I don't use WiFi Protected Setup so I can't comment on that.
The bad news is that D-Link email support is a total, complete waste of time. It was obvious from their email responses that the techs were giving out boilerplate advice without even bothering to read the user information I submitted. The installation 'wizard' is apparently a bit flaky, and every meaningful configuration change during manual configuration requires a LONG reset process. As best I could tell there was no way to make the necessary changes in all the various categories and then reset the router once. It had to go through a painfully long reset after changing items on each page of the interface. The price/performance for the router are good enough I would probably buy it again, but I can't recommend it to anybody who is likely to need meaningful tech support.
Digital camera Review: A great wireless router, just as most all of its users agree.
Summary: 4 Stars
Setup was painless and simple. The set up CD made all the correct settings and the unit was working in my system within 10 minutes of opening the package. The only downside of the set up was that its so automated it didnt ask me for any prefence choices. For example, I always hide my SSID rather than broadcasting it, so I had to get into advanced settings after the router was going to change it. Not a big deal but I suppose a few feedback questions during initial set up would have been nice. The only reason I have given this router four stars instead of five is because the blue LEDs on the front of the unit are just unreasonably bright. My router is on a shelf in a spare bedroom of the house, and I had to cover over the front of the router to dim it enough so that it wasnt disturbing to a guest that was sleeping in the room. There's no reason the LEDs need to be that bright other than maybe for showing it off(?) but I dont know what DLink would think thats important for most users. They could have used smaller LEDs or stuck in a higher impedance resistor on the circuit board and toned it down to what I'd consider a normal brightness.