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Router Built for Gamers
VL writes "Ping times suck? Too much lag? If your loved ones are hogging all your bandwidth with P2P and torrents, you'll want to check out the D-Link DGL-4300 Wireless 108G Gaming Router. This is a router designed for gamers that also happens to be a great router for regular folks."
$120? What makes this router so special? In fact, what the heck IS a gaming router? My $20 Netgear wireless router with logging and access control works fine and it's $100 less. It might not have glowing blue lights and make a front page Slashvertisement, but it works fine for me.
had a review of the D-Link a while ago
I am sceptical about D-Link products - Even though a relatives WLAN Access Point works pretty well, I have made quite bad expiriences with them. Even their USB 2.0 HUB didn't work as promised with my G5 (anyone same experience?) - it only worked in USB 1.0 Mode (although USB 2.0 devices were attached).... So sounds kind of vaporvare to me... But thats just my humble opinion...
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
According to the ExtremeTech review, the ping times are around 300-400ms when the connection is being heavily utilised. Well, that's useless for the target market. Alex Clouter's QoS scripts did a lot better 2 years ago:
http://www.digriz.org.uk/jdg-qos-script/
This is certainly overrated - at least it's slashdotted for sure :-)
The key to good ping times is to have 2 things:
1) A stable, low-latency connection to your ISP
2) Short TX queues.
In essence, 1) is recursively defined by having 2) at your ISP, but ISPs aren't too keen on having minimal TX queues, because that will limit the throughput slightly. Since people behave ridiculous if they get 53 KB/s instead of 55 KB/s, it's a hard compromise between latency and throughput.
Since there is nothing you can do if your ISP isn't up to snuff, I don't see how this router can anything important. If you ping 200, how can that be fixed by carving off something like 10ms?
(yes, I did read as much as possible of the article, which was only page 1 I'm afraid..)
With great numbers come great responsibility!
I spent a long time trying to get a sister product, the DI-624, to work.
First of all, I never tried their MIMO gear, but the range and power on all the previous XG gear I tried was shockingly less than I expected. You felt lucky to penetrate two walls, or go 30 feet. Yes, of course, this is all construction materials and background noise and so forth. But in general the way these devices are marketed you do not realize how unlikely you are to see the performance numbers they claim, or potentially even use the device in a meaningful way at all.
For the first YEAR I owned this product, the firmware was unusuable! The device would work, sure, but gradually you would see latencies and packet loss creep up over a 24-48 hour period until the network was unusable. Some kind of resource leaking... And then you would also see occasional random lockups. Only power cycling the router would help.
Can you picture a cron job that wget's the router reboot URL? Now you are getting the picture. And I know from the forums that earlier DLink adopters had it worse, in many cases much worse. DLink, of course, was just in no hurry at all to fix the problem. AN ENTIRE YEAR. Imagine my amazement when they finally fixed it at all.
I actually tried a competing Linksys product. It was worse, both in terms of analog performance, and also that it would lose 40% of its speed with WPA encryption enabled. Pathetic. The biggest draw there is a GPL firmware you can fix yourself. But don't get me started on the whole Sveasoft evilness. But in general GPL firmware is the way to go, and it's what we need to encourage. It just kills me the Linksys hardware is under-powered.
Of course, none of these chipset manufacturers can be bothered to cooperate on a high speed standard, so you are throwing in your lot with either Atheros or Broadcomm. The DLink XTreme G's are Atheros. So, if you bought in, you didn't just get the router, you got a bunch of cards, too, and you are locked in if you want to realize their high-speed modes.
And don't get me started on the Linux support. There is no GPL driver for these products. None. You can use MadWifi, which is a GPL wrapper around a binary, closed-source "HAL." This disables all the "Xtreme-ness" of the network, and MadWifi, according to their faq, is in no hurry at all to fix that. However, this is the ONLY stable linux driver solution I have found for the newer Atheros chips. You can use NDISWrapper or DriverLoader, however, neither is stable.
Overall 802.11g and derivatives are an ugly, ill-supported, overpromised nightmare, and in hindsight I would never have gotten within 100 yards of one. My advice, stay away unless you have no other choice, and just absolutely love troubleshooting.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Viperlair.com, after reviewing thier weblogs, recently decided Cisco may have been a better choice for their routers.
Mirrordot
According to TFA, this router comes with no password and also lets you get at the admin tools via http rather than https.
OK, most routers are utterly insecure in their default configs, but for something relatively high-end I don't see why they don't require a password. (Not to mention the SSL bit, which is standard on my much older D-Link).
It's not that hard. All you have to do is only allow access to the admin tools until a decent password has been set, and have a hardware reset button that gets you back to that state in case you forget your password.
I suppose you could have an option for a completely open wireless network, but you'd want to require a few confirmation clicks with big fat warnings.
Am I missing something? Is that really so hard?
(And yes, I know people don't normally associate "high-end" with "D-Link" but hey, mine cost $30 and works just fine.)
This Like That - fun with words!
It's a shame to have an Ad article like that...
;)
If only it was something new. The only new thing is the marketing concept, the features are not.
I hope not to see such kind of articles anymore on Slashdot.
i-neo
PS: Fortunately they'll be slashdotted
It's mainstream now, so expect these type of products hitting the market more and more in the near future. It's like video cards. There was a time when a video card didn't have to come with a flashy 3D collage on the box, but now, thanks to the mainstream culture, video cards have to look cool before they're even out of the box.
And now that joe six pack is playing multiplayer games more and more we see routers and other gear that was once only found in the domain of the geek eeking their way onto the plates of the masses.
It's not a bad thing, just something that happens every time something becomes popular. Companies try separating products for specialised tasks, even if the variance between these products is rather insignificant.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
So far, every D-link router product I have had has suffered from 'resetting' under heavy load. D-link's tech support was dismal and their end suggestion was to reduce the speed of the ports to 10mb, and reduce the broadband side to 2mb.. and 'don't put it under such a heavy load'.. What sort of garbage suggestion is that? They expect me to just surf web pages and not get any work done? No thanks.
Needless to say ay I no longer buy ANY D-link product and avidly recommend against them.
Will this new device suffer from the same defects, regardless of their promotion of 'features' ? Or have they finally got a clue and want to produce a useable product?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
it's a D-Link, it'll SAY it has all sorts of useful and great features on the box, but when you plug it in and go to configure it you'll find out those features don't actually WORK, like D-Link's PPTP Client feature of some of their routers, it WILL connect to a PPTP server, but it's only a client for the router itself, not anyone behind the router, so it's not really all that bloody useful as a PPTP client now is it? I HATE D-Link, had 3 products from them, 1 had a meltdown turning a 10/100 switch into a 1Kb switch, 1 print server that fried after a year causing endless line feeds, and a VPN router that couldn't ACTUALLY be used for either end of a VPN connection. 3 strikes, they're out, screw D-Link!
If your loved ones are hogging all your bandwidth... Unplug them! That's what I do when it's game time. "Sorry guys, the Internet is down again."
Nothing beats playing my favorite EA games over my SBC Yahoo! DSL connection using my D-Link DGL-4300 Wireless 108G Gaming Router with a cool, refreshing Pepsi in one hand, my Logitech mouse in the other, wearing my Nike clothes and blasting a ClearChannel affiliate, my source for great new hits from 50 Cent and A Simple Plan.
Whoops, I meant to post that as an article.