I have been a fan of D-Link routers for quite sometime. I have always thought their hardware was good, reliable, and well priced. Since I have an iPad 2 which has a 5 GHz 802.11a transmitter, and I soon will have a new iPhone 5 which also has the same transmitter, I thought it was time to upgrade my wireless. Since I use an Untangle router, all I really needed was an access point, however since there are very few access points that support simultaneous 2.4/5 GHz streams, it was actually easier and cheaper to buy a router and turn it into an access point.
After some research, I settled on the Cloud Router 2000 (DIR-826L) as I was familiar with the D-Link approach, track history with products, and it met my basic requirements.
- Simultaneous 2.4/5 GHz streams
- Under $100
- USB Storage Support (preferred but not mandatory)
Router/AP
The router itself is pretty much what I have come to use in D-Link products. The signal strengths are strong, there were no drop outs in my two weeks of use, and the overall performance was very good. The major difference is that instead of having to load a cd (which I never do as I prefer the manual setup) the wizard starts automatically as they have now built that into the router. This is a great feature for those who rely on the software to configure their settings. Like the CD, you can cancel out of it and access the router configuration as before using the 192.168.0.1
Router Configuration
Storage and User Configuration
USB Storage
One of the optional requirements that I had was to access USB Storage. I know we have various cloud options as well as remote access to our internal storage, but there are uses such as a large video or media collection which is ideally suited for direct access from your router attached storage device. For the most part, this is where the story changes from good to not so good. The configuration is pretty straight forward if you are somewhat familiar with devices such as the DNS-323 or similar. I found it the interface to be very rough and generally unfriendly. If you are comfortable with maneuvering around in a router screen, you will be fine, however if you are looking for something that is polished like the DM software from Synology, you will be sorely disappointed. In addition to the clunky interface for setting up the storage and user access, the copy performance was terrible. To be fair, I was copying to a Flash drive so assumingly the performance would go up with a faster USB drive but the fact it was not even achieving the capability of the Flash drive is disappointing.
Mobile Apps
This is an area that D-Link sort missed the boat on. The concept is very cool, some of the screens are well designed, but the overall experience is pretty bad. For starters, the setup screen is very quirky and clears everything you put in when you make a correction. In addition, the setup was not as straight forward as it should be and and the whole process of getting it going requires a higher level of experience than should be required in a consumer product. The worst part of the applications is the performance. When I looked at some photos, the speed of even the thumbnails coming up was horrible. They could obviously stand to learn something from the SkyDrive team when it comes to performance.
Sample iPad View
Summary
So would I recommend this product? Yes and No. If you are buying this as a router and care about reliability, simultaneous dual band, and price/performance, then absolutely this is a great product. Assuming of course that you are not interested in the attached storage and their “Cloud” concept which does not work very well. For about $90, it is tough to find better “router hardware” that has simultaneous dual band support in this price range. If however you are looking for a home Cloud solution, look elsewhere as you will be sorely disappointed in the whole experience. I am definitely keeping this product as for me it fits the bill perfectly since my primary objective was fast and reliable wireless hardware, but just know in advance what your needs are when you buy it.
Pros
- Simultaneous Dual Band 2.4/5 GHz
- Gigabit Switch
- Strong performance
- Strong Signal Strength
- Easy Router configuration
- Low cost for this caliber of a router
Cons
- USB storage performance is extremely slow
- Storage performance is not straight forward to setup
- Mobile apps lack polish and are often buggy
- MyDlink service extremely buggy and not very functional
