Is D-Link Crap?

Very inconsistent.

My setup with a dwl-g650, a dwl-g520 and a di-624 rev C2 was flakey at first, improved to excellent after a firmware upgrade on the router, began to deteriorate, and then improved after several more firmware upgrades.

The setup tended to be excellent - for a few days at a time, and then bogged down for no apparent reason. Rebooting the router sometimes fixed the problem. Doing a "crash recovery" (full system reset) followed by reloading the firmware also tended to fix the problems - for a while. Recently (the router is 10 months old), it's gotten too flakey to use. Throughput and latency became unacceptably slow. Crash recovery and reflashing no longer fixed the router. It was too old to RMA, and DLink tech support had no clue.

I have no idea what the issue is, but if you go to broadbandreports website and check the forums (under hardware by vendor / dlink) you'll find that many, many people seem to be suffering from similar problems, and many also suffer from random reboots seemingly caused by nearby 2.4 ghz phones (not all brands - generally panasonic). DLink's answer is to turn off the Turbo feature -- which is unacceptable to most, because that's part of the reason the bought the router in the first place.

I've found tech support to be generally weak and unresponsive. Answers sound like they come from a very sparse script, rather than from knowledgeable techs.

I wanted, very much, to like this equipment and to make it work. I finally gave up and replaced it a couple of days ago with Belkin "pre-N" equipment, which seems to be working beautifully so far.

I urge you to go to broadbandreports and review the hardware vendors forums to get a feel for the level of problems people are having with the various brands before you make a decision.

I have a DWL900+ AP which I use at home very occasionally, sometimes for testing/setting up wireless PCs/laptops and sometimes to allow me to connect my laptop to the newtork while watching TV (interactive shows).

Given the amount of messing around that I do with it, re-flashing it to different FW levels and repeatedly resetting it, I think it behaves very well.

I am also responsible for several wireless networks at work, having installed them in several satellite offices around town.

In 1 office there was a DWL-900+, which stayed in daily service for about 6 months. It then stopped working and was replaced by a DWL-2000. This is now in daily service and has given no trouble. The

900+ which I removed from that office is now in my toolkit as a test item, because having got it back to the workshop and tested it I found nothing wrong with it.

There is another DWL-900+ in another office, been there about 1 year, never had any calls about it, other than, about 3 months after I installed it I was asked to set up another laptop to use it. Maybe next time I'm at work I'll ping it to see if it's still in use!

In another office there are 2 DWL-2000s which have been in situ for about 2 months and about which we get nearly daily calls about them not working. The problem is often sorted out over the phone by getting one of the users to turn one or both of the devices on.

One of the first installations I did I used a Belkin AP (can't remember the designation) and after several call backs for various failures I replaced it with a Linksys which we had on the shelf. This has given no trouble at all, in over a year.

A few weeks ago we installed an ambitious wireless network in one of our offices, giving full wireless connectivity throughout the building, utilizing 6 DWL-2000+ APs. Fortunately, we have a resident technician at that site and he was able to sort out the minor problems which arose, as well as moving some of the APs around to give optimum coverage. (We did do a site survey, but with only 1 unit. This gave different results to what you get with 6 units running.)

At one office we had an issue where, due to an oversight on the part of whoever had been responsible for installing the wired network, we had 2 separate and distinct wired networks, and no quick way to join them together, other than to use a wireless bridge.

This was accomplisehd by putting 2 DWL-900+ APs into bridge mode, attaching directional antennae to them and pointing accordingly. This setup ran for a couple of months until we could get contractors in to bridge the gap with fibre.

Once the fibre was brought into use I checked with the users of the 'detached' network to see if they had noticed any improvement in service. They hadn't, and were not aware that any changes had taken place.

Most of the PCs and laptops are fitted with D-Link PCI cards or PCMCIA cards. All laptops run WinXP, the PCs run either XP or 98. My own laptop card is a DWL-AG650+, though I also have a selection consisting of Orinoco, Dell, Xircom and Netgear, which I use for testing in various situations. And I use the Dell in my iPaq.

I use (and specify, where I am not actually doing the installation) D-Link products because they are inexpensive, they are simple to administer, they provide usefull tools like the ability to reduce the output power so that people in the street don't necessarily get to hear the transmissions, they are, at least in my experience, reliable and they are not large and ugly like Linksys products.

Also there is a wide range of antennae available off the shelf for them, which is not true of Belkin, Netgear or Linksys. And they are readily available, from the likes of

and dabs.com, which the likes of Buffalo, Cisco, Proxim are not.

My experience of D-Link's tech support is restricted to a couple of e-mails, whereby I asked a question, was sent an answer and that solved my problem.

H>opinions?

My favourite little D-Link is the AP700 - use as an AP, repeater or client. Always keep around half a dozen to hand always finding jobs for them somewhere (ideal for joining wired and wireless networks - one as an AP and the other as a client plugged into a switch). Not had any failures yet (touch wood)