Digital Trends

D-Link DIR-660 Limited Edition

August 14th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

The OLED Display

Of course, the real star of the show here is the fancy OLED display, and though the idea of it sounds cool, the execution is much less so. The main problem is these displays are expensive, so the unit on the router is quite small, which makes it very difficult to read from a distance. And by a “distance,” we mean from a few feet away. For example, here is an image standing up with the router on the floor.

You have to be closer than a foot to make out the tiny letters dashing across the screen, and nobody wants to sit there and stare at their router to see what’s happening on their network.

If you do stare, you’ll see your IP information, what inbound packets the router is blocking, and other information. For example, if you unplug the WAN cable, it’ll tell you. It’s interesting — for about 30 seconds. After that initial viewing, most people will put the router on a shelf and never look at it again. Though we like the idea of such a display, in reality, it offers little actual value to the product. It basically looks cool, and that’s about it.

If you’re interested in what the firewall is doing, you can see it on the OLED display

Range

One of the big advantages of 802.11N isn’t just increased performance, but a big boost in range as well. According to Wikipedia’s numbers, 802.11G is supposed to broadcast for 95 meters outdoors, with N boosting the signal up to 165 meters. We performed some real world tests, however, and were unable to discern any advantage at all when using N over G. We set the router to broadcast in both G and N speeds and then did the very scientific “walk far away from the router and watch the signal strength” test, and it was the same distance in either mode. Then, just for kicks, we plugged in an old Netgear G router and performed the same test to find that the Netgear router actually had better range than the D-Link router, even in N mode. To say this was disappointing is an understatement.