- Up to 450Mbps (2.4GHz) + 4500Mbps (5GHz)
- Backward Compatibility - Compatible with a/b/g/n devices
- mydlink Cloud Management - Monitor and manage your network from anywhere
Decent router that looks very nice and works fine with some quirks
08/29/2013
This review is from: D-Link DIR-855L Wireless N900 Simultaneous Dual-Band Gigabit Router w/ SmartBeam Technology IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n, IEEE 802.3/3u/3ab
Pros:
The router is a Piano black cylindrical device with a high WAF, which is a very good Applesque design and can be a conversation starter. The router also does not get too hot and remains slightly warm when operational.
The WAN / internet LED is a smart light in the sense that it senses an actual connection to the Internet and not just a cabled plugged into an ethernet port.
The router web interface seemed to have an inactivity logout timer which is a good thing if the window is left on by mistake on a shared computer.
All the clients TCP / UDP sessions are visible under the Internet Sessions menu of the router and is helpful for debugging and security audits.
With QoS enabled and with a simultaneous continuous upload session to my cloud server, latency increased just a bit to 17ns and download speeds remained at 10Mbps.
Cons:
A minor irritation of this router is that almost all modifications require a lengthy reboot session of the order of 40 - 60 secs. Sometimes the router would not behave as intended after reboot and would drop connections and would have to be reboot once more.
For some unknown reason one of my mbp shows up as 802.11a device @ 243Mbps in the Wifi status page, when infact I had setup the 5GHz Wifi Access Point to work only as 802.11n.
In the WPS menu with PIN option there is a typo and "within is printed as winth"
With automatic upload speed detection, WiFi security is not enabled immediately at bootup and some clients can connect to the router at that time without WPA / WEP. Security is enabled after a minute or so and the clients then disconnect and reconnect, which could be an annoyance and a minor security issue.
WiFi allows guest SSID, but bandwidth control is not available for guest SSID.
QoS automatic bandwidth calculation did not work well. It calculated my upload speed as 3.3Mbps while it's actually 1Mbps, as advertised and tested through speedtest.net.
There are no LED for the ethernet ports to either indicate connectivity or the speed like 100/1000Mbps.
The antennae are integrated within the device which seems to reduce the range.
Overall Review:
There are two LED at the front; one for power and another for showing internet connectivity. Both LED can change colors form orange to green.
The WAN / internet LED is a smart light in the sense that it senses an actual connection to the Internet and not just a cabled plugged into an ethernet port.
At the back there are 5 gigabit ethernet ports, one for WAN and 4 for LAN connectivity. There's a power switch and WPS, reset buttons.
The router is powered by a 120V/230V wall wart with slightly short power cable.
The web interface is the usual DLink orange/ grey interface with additional menu items tailored for this specific router.
To test Wifi the router was setup at a height of 3.5 feet from ground and the laptop (Macbook pro retina display 15" also kept at similar height). I used 5Ghz Wifi Channel 36 as well as 149. It works well with a Macbook pro retina, A macbook pro 15", and a mobile device viz. Nokia N9.
WiFi throughput between a wired gigabit server and my Macbook Pro 802.11n using the 5GHz band ranged from 50Mbps to 80Mbps, which is marginal at best.
During the test no other device used the channel.
WAN ethernet port supports Gbps, and the router claims to support true gigabit hardware routing. It may be a great feature for extremely fast internet connection, but with my 10Mbps down / 1Mbps up connection, it disabled QoS bandwidth shaping and SPI firewall and produced no perceivable difference in normal web browsing use.
With true gigabit routing enabled, QoS traffic shaping was disabled. To test the performance as a home user, I started a file upload session to a web server and simultaneously used speedtest.net to check my bandwidth and latency. Latency increased quite a bit from 11ns to 300ns, speed of opening webpages slowed down, even though download bandwidth stayed at 10Mbps. I would thus favor QoS over true gigabit routing for my type of xx MBps internet connection.
A cat6 cable instead of a Cat5e could have been bundled with the router considering it's a gigabit router.
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- Abhishek M.
-
EggXpert
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Owned For:
1 week to 1 month
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