D-Link DIR-855 review

D-Link's DIR-855 router has more features than most, but these come at a price.

The most obvious is the bright OLED screen, which makes it easy to check the status of your network at the touch of a button. It can display up- and down-stream speeds, information such as IP address, wireless SSIDs and channels, plus the connection logs. This is all useful, although the two-button navigation system isn't that easy to use.

The screen may be helpful, but the DIR-855's dual-band wireless networking is more so. It can broadcast a signal on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously, so can communicate with legacy 2.4GHz 802.11g and 802.11a equipment at the same time as 5GHz Draft-N kit. If you have trouble connecting to your wireless network because of interference or channel conflicts with your neighbours' routers, the 5GHz band should be useful as the bandwidth is uncluttered, due to the rarity of devices using it.

The web-based interface is easy to use, with features such as port forwarding and access controls that let you blacklist or whitelist specific URLs. Dynamic DNS providers are limited to DynDNS and D-Link's service at www.dlinkddns.com, but at least you can get an easy-to-remember domain name that points to your router even if its IP address changes. The quality of service (QoS) can prioritise certain kinds of internet traffic, such as VoIP, streaming video or games, to reduce lag, packet loss and buffering times.

Our graphs show the DIR-855's performance when transferring data via Draft-N to a Centrino 2 laptop, which is fitted with Intel's WiFi Link 5100AGN. They also show the speeds achieved when using D-Link's DWA-160 dual-band Draft-N USB adaptor on the 5GHz band; this combination produced transfer speeds of up to 61.5Mbit/s at a distance of 10m.

Testing with Centrino 2, even at 25m, we saw stable connections and speeds of 24.2Mbit/s when using the 5GHz band. At 25m, we got transfer speeds of 11.3Mbit/s on the 2.4GHz band. We saw the fastest speeds in our near- and medium-distance tests with D-Link's Draft-N adaptor on 2.4GHz, reaching 72Mbit/s at 1m, 69.9Mbit/s at 10m and 18.2Mbit/s at 25m. The 2.4GHz Draft-N signal strength proved better than that of Netgear's WNDR3300, leading to better range. However, the DIR-855's price is hard to justify, even taking into account the Gigabit LAN ports. There's no built-in ADSL modem, and no backwards- compatibility with 802.11b.

If your wireless network suffers due to interference or you want a powerful long-range wireless router for media streaming or online gaming, this is an excellent, if pricy, choice. Alternatively, SMC's SMC7904WBRA-N supports only 2.4GHz but costs less, has an ADSL2+ modem and should be fast enough to satisfy most users.

Author: Kat Orphanides