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D-Link AirPlus DI-614+ Wireless 22 Mbps Broadband Router

D-Link AirPlus DI-614+ Wireless 22 Mbps Broadband Router

List Price: $89.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Speedy, Good Signal Strength, and Lots of Features
Review: I first impressed with the number of features this router was capable of doing. For this price I honestly didn't expect so much from it. I just wanted a router to expand my wired network to wireless. After finding out what it can do I just had to have one.

I brought this baby home, plugged in the power, plugged in my WAN connection, filled in the neccessary settings, upgraded the firmware, and the next thing I knew I was able to access the Internet with the greatest of ease. There are so many controls that come standard with this router I don't think I will ever use them all, but I am happy they are there. Well when my kids get older and start using the computers I can use the parental controls to restrict what they can access on the Internet. There is even a feature to only allow certain MAC addresses to have access the Internet so if my neighbor has an 802.11b card they can't use my Internet access without me knowing.

Everything about this was fairly simple to set up thanks to the manual, and I would definitly recommend this to others.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Quick Painless Setup and Great Signal Strength
Review: ...The signal strength throughout our home is great and I am in love with the fact I don't have Ethernet cables lying around the house anymore. I was almost about to run the cabling through the walls, but luckily wireless is [inexpensive] enough now a days.

I was impressed with the speeds and the advanced features that come standard with this router. The speeds were comparable to my old wired network as far as web browsing and some downloading goes. The features look like they'd be great, but right now I don't have a high demand for them. I have been using some port filtering and one MAC address block, and I am glad that there are more options to utilize in the future.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: DHCPoop
Review: While D-Link has improved thier response times to email questions thier answers are canned and unhelpful. For some bizzare reason my router keeps giving away all my DHCP IPs to the same unknown MAC address. I've turned off the wireless connection (so it's not getting in that way) and I can's imagine that it coming in from my modem. Even if I set the lease time for the IPs to a week it'll give this other MAC my leased IPs. MAC filtering for DHCP or DHCP that assigns IPs based on MACs would instantly solve all my problems. Other than that I'm at least midly satisfied with it although it does have some problems with AFS and ssh connections. I think I'm going to just use it as an access point and bring my old garbage linksys router to do all the DHCP and firewalling.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Out-of-Box Experience
Review: Setting up a small home network (3 PCs) has proved relatively easy with this D-Link product as the nerve-center. I bought this and 2 wireless NICs (one DWL-520 and one DWL-520+). Both also worked right out of the box.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Still flaky ... Firmware ...
Review: ..., and I am giving the manufacturer [time] to produce firmware that solves my problems. Otherwise, I return it. Why? An 802.11b (WI-FI) compliant device must be able to work with other compliant devices, regardless of brand. This one doesn't in my experience. A router should not reset itself randomly.

For one, I have already upgraded the firmware twice (1.1 to 2.0f, 2.0f to 2.03), and it is still flaky. Two, I have been unable to get a Cisco Aironet 340 PCMCIA Card to Associate (one that works on other networks). Three, a Compaq WL100 PCMCIA Card will Associate, but, it has obtained an IP address only once in over 100 Associations! Four, the router appears to reset itself, irregardless of configuration; this means that even my wired PC connections lose access to the WAN. This latter has nothing to do with my ability to configure the unit. ...

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Basic functions are great, but falls short after that
Review: I was up and running out of the box within 5 minutes like most others. However, if you are looking to customize to your network, that's where the problems start. In short, bad to no documentation for anything beyond the wizard setup such as custom router vs. bridge options, WEP flakiness, multiple 1 to 1 NAT doesn't seem to be a choice, firewall is a joke to administer, tech support is a handful of robots, and non-existent connections where it once was working fine, with no remedy other than rebooting. Not a bad item for the price, but the built-in functions do not work 100% and are buggy. Firmware didn't help me and in fact seem to make the dead connections worse. Most opinions I've read regarding positive feedback seems to be on the ease of setup. I think the smiles will wear off if trying to integrate with exisiting multi-tiered networks.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Router works pretty well, wireless not so well
Review: I purchased the DI-614+ along with the D-Link DWL-650+ PCMCIA NIC card for my wife's laptop. Setup of the two devices was fairly straight-forward, but the wireless network is unreliable.

Most of the time, my wife's computer is within 10 feet of the access point. Signal strength at this distance varies from "Excellent" to "Low". Also, if her computer is left on overnight, the wireless network is always down in the morning. The only way to resolve this appears to be by rebooting the router/access point. (This is an option in the web interface.) Needless to say, this is pretty annoying. If the computer were half way across the house, I would be a little more forgiving. But since it's within a few feet (with nothing in between them), I'm not so happy with it. At this point, I'm not certain whether the problem is with the access point or the NIC. Given that a reboot of the access point "resolves" the problem, I'm inclined to believe that it's the access point. Unfortunately, I don't have any more equipment to test this theory with.

The rest of the review is somewhat technical. I want to make it clear that the default settings on the device allowed me to connect to the internet and wireless network without changes. However, I tinker with settings quite a bit. What is described below are my findings from these experiments.

One oddity that I've encountered is that the wireless NIC seems to want to look for the access point on Channel 6 all of the time. (This is the default value on the access point.) I changed the channel of the access point to another value, and the network card would only recognize it occasionally. Once I changed the channel of the access point back to 6, though, the network card recognized the network every time the computer rebooted. (Note that even with this setting, the laptop still loses the connection on a regular basis.)

Another problem I've discovered is that generating keys for WEP is not as straight-forward as it should be. With the latest firmware for the DI-614+ (version 2.0f) the access point does not allow the administrator to put in a pass code to generate the encryption keys. So, if you want to use WEP, you'll have to generate the encryption keys yourself and manually enter them into each of the wireless access cards. Of course, not allowing the pass code actually makes the wireless network more secure. But if you need the convenience (such as for a large network), you'll be out of luck.

As a router, the DI-614+ fares well. Out of the box, the router works as advertised. All I did was plug my computer (on a wired network) into one of the ports and the cable modem into the WAN link, and everything worked. The default settings in the firewall are pretty secure, but UPnP was enabled by default and the router answered pings from the outside world. Fortunately, both of these options can be changed. In addition, the other firewall settings are very configurable (as expected).

There are sections that allow the administrator to configure "Applications", "Virtual Servers", and other stuff. Several applications are preconfigured such as Battle.net and MSN gaming zone. These are disabled by default, but are simple to enable. (Note: The Battle.net configuration isn't complete, and won't work with Diablo II. You'll need to make some minor modifications to get this to work.)

The "Virtual Server" section allows you to turn on ports such as 21 for FTP, 23 for telnet, etc. I was a bit surprised to see that port 22 (SSH) wasn't included. As with the applications, these are disabled by default and the administrator can enable them as he/she sees fit.

The last section of the firewall configuration is a more "traditional" firewall configuration. In this section, two rules are pre-defined and enabled. The rules prevent all access from the outside-in and enable all access from the inside-out. These rules cannot be changed. However, rules that are added by the administrator override the pre-defined ones.

One downside to the router, though, is that port 113 (identd) is visible to the outside world. I see no way to prevent the router from answering queries to this port. The response to these queries is that its unavailable, but I wish I could get it to just drop the packets instead.

A quick recap of the review: the router works well and is very configurable (except for the identd port). The wireless access point, though, does not appear to be reliable.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Horrible Tech Support and Problem Plagued Product
Review: Bought this unit because of its reviews and its price. Big mistake. First off I am using BellSouth Fast Access DSL with a Dell laptop running Windows2K and IE 6.0 . This DSL does use dynamic PPPoE and has been a problem for many others judging by the user ratings I have read.

Unpacked unit and read the install documentation paying particular attention to the PPPoE information. The initial configuration went smoothly but could not connect to the internet at all.

Called the 800 number listed in the installation guide and in the tech manual on CD. No answer. Tried again - no answer. Guess what - the number in their documentation is not correct. Got the right number by removing the router, going back to my old configuration and then visiting their website. Got the right number and was on hold for 45 minutes before getting through to a support person.

He was courteous but not very experienced technically speaking. He told me that I needed to install the latest firmare version (2.0f) and that there was a 2.0 version which I needed to get from their website first and install before installing the 2.0f version. Guess what - no 2.0 version of the firmaware was listed as being available on their website. When I told the tech that he said well probably I could just skip it. I also found that there was an error when trying to open the firmware install instruction procedure on their website. The support tech immediately emailed the instructions to me.

I installed the 2.0f firmware update and then went through the router configuration again. No different from the first time, still couldn't connect to the internet. Called tech support again. The wait was shorter this time, only 35 minutes. Thesecond support tech was even less experienced than the first. After trying everything he knew he told me that he would put me in the queue for a call from a level 2 support person the following morning or if I wanted I could call after 9:00 A.M. No second level support techs work the graveyard shift he explained.

Called for the third time at 10:00 (East Coast Time) and after the standard 45 minute wait learned that no 2nd level support people were available until 9:00 WEST COAST TIME. This third support tech had me redo the same steps the previous two had already instructed me to try with the same results - no ability to connect. He promised to have one of the 2nd level support people call me and noted that the second person with which I spoke had incorrectly logged my problem as being resolved.

Great, waited until 5:00 P.M. my time but no call ever came. Called tech support again (4th time now) and hit the jackpot. Wait time was now over an hour. Finally got through and was informed that no 2nd or 3rd level support personnel were available currently. The tech retraced the steps performed by all of his predecessors w/o bothering to look at their notes. Same result, can't connect. Promised to have a more senior support person call me and that the call would happen within 15 minutes. After an additional 2 1/2 hours no call came in. Packed the router and returned it to the store from which it came.

If you aren't using PPPoE this router probably works ok. If you are running PPPoE and you need tech support then get ready for a real nightmare. My advice - buy anything but D-Link.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Excellent setup, sketchy details...
Review: Everything about the D-Link AirPlus DI-614+ is perfect, minus one important fact: there is very little information on teaching a home user how to setup the firewall and encryption feature. The manuals are a joke and the D-Link website is useless. Trust me on this. However, every other fact about the router is excellent. I just wish D-Link would provide more information on actual set-up features...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Answer to your wireless dreams
Review: I recently bought a HP laptop and I wanted to create a wireless network so that I could carry my laptop around the house. After doing several searches for routers and wireless cards I finally decided on this one. So I bought it and installed it the same day. I was up and running within 15 minutes at the most. It was extremely easy to set up and works like a dream. I'm also a networking major in college so I've had experience with this type of thing and I think you will be very happy with this purchase.


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