I decided buy a wireless router to replace my existing Netgear WGR64, which required me to reboot everyday. I don’t have any devices that are 802.11N Draft capable. I do have 3 Laptops/computers, a Wii (which rarely uses the WiFi connection) and a Vonage adapter in my network.
Buying another 802.11g device seemed like going backwards. But I didn’t need a router for $100+ with all the bells and whistles.
I did some research on http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ and on dailywireless.com. I found smallnetbuilder particularly useful with the comparison charts and reviews.
I don’t really need a Gigabit router (atleast at this time). With N Draft 2.0 support, dual bandwidth (works only with N-draft devices), 2 antennas, automatic QoS, good throughput/routing performance and reasonable price; DIR-625 was good enough for me. I purchased this from Amazon for around $50 and the router arrived within 4 days(free shipping).
I have used the router for nearly a month and quite satisfied with the performance. No more reboots everyday and dropped connections. Occasionally pages do not load completely and I have to reload them, but I’m not sure whether it’s a router issue and happens only once or twice a day.
But I found it really annoying the way Web site filtering/blocking is implemented. It never works for me. You have to enter the URL or domain that you want to block or allow. There’s no keyword filtering which I had been used to with Netgear. Once you define the filter then you have to create an access control policy and apply the filter over there. But you can not create more than one filter, just one and that is applied to any policy that you create. Sounds really stupid !!! On top of all this pain, filtering doesn’t work at all. When I enter a domain to be blocked such as youtube.com router happily ignores the rule. D-Link probably wants everyone to subscribe to their SecureSpot ( a subscription based parental control and security service) that costs around $60 a year.
After some googling, I found that I can use OpenDNS (www.opendns.com) or DynDNS (www.dyndns.com) to implement website filtering. Here is what I did:
I created an account with DynDNS and setup my access control rules for website filtering, which was simple enough. You can block entire categories and also add specific domains to block/allow list.
Then go to D-Link Console. Select Setup on the to menu and choose Internet on the Left menu. Provide the Primary and secondary DNS Server IPs (for OpenDNS or DynDNS)under the Dynamic IP (DHCP) Internet Connection Type table.
There you go. I had setup website filtering without shelling out more green and I can manage it from anywhere.
Other than that I’m not going to bother to return the DIR-625 and spend more hours on researching for the next router. I would rather wait till 802.11n specs are finalized and there are some solid products based on that.
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