Review on 🌐 D-Link DIR-836L: High-Speed Dual-Band Gigabit Router (Discontinued Model) with Home Cloud App by Tim Wadman

We've had this router for about a month now and are generally happy with it. We chose D-Link because it's one of the few wireless routers to explicitly state that it supports multiple simultaneous VPN client sessions. Our previous router (Netgear) allowed multiple VPN sessions, but crashed at least once a day when running multiple VPN sessions. One was fine. Two is a guaranteed crash. Too bad, because otherwise we liked Netgear. With this D-Link, we had 3 simultaneous VPN sessions throughout the day with no issues. So if you're looking for a router that supports multiple simultaneous VPN client sessions, look no further. Installation was generally straightforward, with a few caveats. First, our router came with the original firmware (1.0). The current firmware is 1.03, apparently solves a number of problems. We recommend downloading the latest firmware before plugging in the router so you can easily update it after installation. IPv4 multicast routing is inexplicably disabled by default. If you're using a streaming media device like AppleTV, you probably want to enable IPv4 multicast. It's in the Additional Network settings on the Advanced tab. Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) is also disabled by default, which can be enabled in the Firewall Settings section of the Advanced tab. It's debatable whether you need SPI, but it helps mitigate Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and performance degradation from port scanning and other script-based attacks, so we usually include it. Finally, the user interface is almost unchanged from the D-Link we had 10 years ago and could use a bit of simplification. Settings are spread across multiple tabs and categories, and finding a setting (often just a checkbox) can take a long time. Luckily, the online help in the support tab is very good. Those complaints aside, we add that it correctly detected our cable modem connection and network and set itself up without user intervention. If they could make the UI a bit more user-friendly and provide better default settings, we'd give it five stars.