Extreme Gigabit Routers for the Home

I recently purchased a D-Link Xtreme N gigabit router for the home network, and I have been pleasantly surprised. I was hoping that my jump into the world of low-price (119$) gigabit routers was not going to result in overly complicated setups, bad performance, or just bad quality that I have experienced in other routers. Overall, the experience was good.

I started here. Platon Scheblykin basically wrote an article reverse-engineering the D-Link (DIR 655). Being the hardware geek that I am, this article also fed my curiosity with it's breakdown of performance and throughput numbers. Platon also breaks open the DIR-655 and explains layer by layer the good and bad points of the layout and packaging. This is an extremely detailed and thorough article. It is worth the read if you are considering the D-Link DIR-655.

I have'nt had any hiccups so far with the D-Link DIR-655. The wireless network is reaching areas I never was able to reach with my old Netgear 802.11g 100MBps wireless router. I also, port forward to my web server and that setup took a total of 10 minutes. I was happy with the GUI interface. I thought the interface was well thought out, and I only experienced one issue during the setup and the problem was outside of the router (my linux firewall on my web server had port 80 closed :) Other than that I believe the entire setup took 30 minutes to get working with my BellSouth Westell router.

I am also seeing awesome speeds with a file server and other computers on the network. Much of this however, can simply be attributed to going from 100MBps to 1GBps. The QOS is great. I can throttle certain types of traffic while I am working to allocate enough bandwidth for VPN.

I do plan on getting a D-Link wireless card and hope to have more details on the improvements made on my network. Also, I will be posting pictures and specs soon to help anyone else who might be interested in GB home networks, and I should be delving more into the home entertainment area. For now, though I am happy with the home bandwidth boost, and will be happier when fiber gets here to my neighborhood at the end of this year.