Review on 📶 D-Link DIR-645 Wireless-N Whole-Home Router (Discontinued by Manufacturer) by Shawn Trotter

I bought this router to replace my trusty Buffalo router that had a floor accident and the plastic was cracked. Buffalo's latest routers haven't been seen with good reviews, so I've decided to try something else. This device had a lot of good reviews and I decided to buy it. The product arrived in two days as promised by Revain. Now we come to the assessment. My first impression upon opening the box was that this product is in no way aesthetically pleasing as it is a short, thick, vertical black cylinder. The first thing you need is to find a place to hide this monster!. Then I noticed that the router didn't have any wall mount options, so wall mounting was nearly impossible. Unlike most other routers, this router is equipped with a switch. Could it be because of the numerous issues requiring constant reboots that D-Link actually decided to put a power button on the device?! CD into your computer first. I'm not a big fan of installing other software (most likely a USB driver) to set up this device. So I plugged it into a power source anyway and plugged the gigabit port directly into my laptop. It's pretty easy to access the configuration page via a web browser and I can't understand why D-Link would want us to use the CD that came with the router. Configuration was pretty easy with lots of options. But from a technical perspective, I've seen that many of the advanced configuration options found in wireless routers allow you to tweak wireless settings like Tx antenna gain. unexpected power failure, etc. Configuration took less than 15 minutes, even without using the software provided. A quick check of the house with a Wi-Fi analyzer showed pretty strong signals throughout the house, so in theory I shouldn't have any range or speed issues. Working with the device was a completely different experience. The first thing I noticed was that the device was blocking my internet access very often. What I noticed is that the built-in DNS was not responding to my requests, so all pages expired with a DNS error. Rebooting the device will make it work for a while before becoming unresponsive again. Replacing the DNS relay flag in the router seems to have fixed the issue as the router now sends all my requests directly to the configured DNS provider. While this is a bug, I don't think it's a serious one. I soon noticed that my internet speed dropped dramatically, especially when working from locations more than 15 feet from my router. The drop in speed is so sharp that the speed near the router is about 55 Mbit/s, and when fed from the router at about 15-20 (with two drywalls) the speed drops to about 4 Mbit/s. No reboot solves the problem. The router was sold with "Smart Beam" technology and in my experience it does not live up to its promises. So the device is back at Revain and I have to search again for a replacement for my Buffalo device (although it's now taped it performs better!)