Review: DLink WBR-1310 Wireless Router

Between home and office I've owned literally dozens of routers over the years and this is hands down the worst one ever, even by Dlink's low standards. It's wasted alot of my time and I'm pretty pissed off. Before I throw it out (literally) and never look back: For the record, and future google group searches, here are some facts about my experience with this model:

Lets call it "The top 10 reasons not to buy a Dlink" :

10) If you login to the router and go to the firmware section it says "Currect Firmware Version: 4.0". Currect? Nice typo. Not a big deal, but perhaps a good indication of how much DLink was paying attention when they rushed this cheapo model onto the market. It makes you wonder how many typos they left in the actual firmware. It explains a lot about how this router behaves.

9) No documentation included. A little explaination about the router's setup menus would be nice. Maybe an explaination about which lights are which on the router. I feel badly for anyone whose first experience dealing with a router is this piece of junk. Even with years of experience this thing is not 'self explainatory' and its certainly not 'plug and play'. Its 'plug and pray' or maybe 'plug and PAIN'.

8) Only comes with a Setup Wizard CD. The wizard fails to setup on THREE seperate computers. It is poorly written JUNK... Why a router even needs a CD is beyond me, but once it fails your left wasting your left scratching your head without documentation and wasting your time.

7) If you go to the Dlink site and look up firmware for this WBR-1310 router (as of today):

formatting link
It offers you to download firmware version 1.03. My WBR-1310 says it's running Firmware Version 4.0. So.... Is DLink going back in time? If you call up Tech support they say the most recent one is Firmware 4.0. Gee, thanks for wasting some more of my time DLink.

6) A random example of how messed up this router is: I went to release & renew my router's IP address, my external one. It is on DCHP from my ISP. It returned with a WAN IP of 192.168.0.11... So now the router has a LAN IP address of 192.168.0.1 and a WAN IP address of 192.168.0.11.... Wow that's just brilliant. My router is chasing its own tail? So I try it again 30 seconds later, and it gets a proper 72.xx.xx.12 address. The point: It's completely inconsistant. This is proof enough for me that this router is JUNK.

5) Lets say you hard reset the router, and start from scratch. You set it for DHCP on the WAN. It will properly get an IP and DNS etc from your ISP (usually). But in order to surf the web you have to log into the router and go into the "Dynamic IP (DHCP) section" and hit "Clone Mac Address" for it to properly work. The WBR-1310 doesnt believe in plug in play.

4) If you actually get frustrated enough to look up DLink's tech support and call them they will put you on hold for well over 35 minutes (I write this now as I'm on hold). If you actually get through then you will speak with an overworked stressed out little person who will put you on hold for another 10 minutes but eventually can't help you at all. But they will agree that it is "not our greatest product" and they get alot of calls about it. When asked why the unit says Firmware 4.0 and the website says Firmware 1.03 they aren't sure, and they dont really care. Thanks DLink!

3) CONSTANTLY LOSES INTERNET CONNECTIVETY WITH *WIRED* COMPUTERS, NEVERMIND WIRELESS!!!

2) CONSTANTLY NEEDS TO BE RESET.

1) WORST ROUTER EVER.

....And now, without further due, (and before it disconnects me again), I now will DESTROY THIS ROUTER and reconnect my old reliable Linksys....

Reply to
dennispublic
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Reply to
Kevin Weaver

In fairness this might be an ISP issue, often times an ISP will fix on a given MAC address before allowing traffic. This even after giving an DHCP lease.

But otherwise, yeah, sounds like a real piece o'crap.

Reply to
Bill Kearney

thanks for the info

regards free free games online games

Reply to
rockie2323

Mine always identified the firmware as 1.01. I wonder if others who've had problems with this router also had the firmware mis-identified. Could explain a lot.

Although it's inconvenient, it shouldn't take anyone any time at all to find the manual in .pdf format on the cd. (There is a newer version available on D-link's website.)

I agree. The wizard failed for me also. Didn't need it anyway.

Why on earth would you clone your MAC address AFTER you successfully got an IP address from your ISP? You only need to do this if you didn't release the IP address from whatever computer was connected to the internet previously, (you could wait for the DHCP lease to expire in this case), or if your ISP insists on connecting to a particular NIC. If you're already connected, it's unnecessary. Once your router is connected to the Internet, releasing and renewing the IP on the connected computers should get them connected, assuming the DHCP server on the router is enabled.

I bought this router a few weeks ago, fully intending to return it if it didn't meet my expectations. So far I'm happy with it. It plays well with bittorrent. It has locked up only once, but that was the day I discovered there was a firmware upgrade (1.03) that claims to fix a lockup issue. Right now the only problem I have with it is it won't let me log into it's configuration utility (the web page built into the router) after it's been running for a couple days, but it is still doing it's job just fine. Cycling the power fixes that problem.

It's not as configurable as the router I had been using, which was a specialized version of linux called Freesco running on an old computer, but it's adequate, and it only cost $40.

Reply to
scotta316

I was just on D-link's website, and they've updated the page for the WBR-1310 in the past few days. Apparently firmware version 4.0 is what shipped with hardware version D1 of this router. Before, H/W version A1 was the only one listed on the site, and that's the one I bought.

Reply to
scotta316

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