D-Link Wireless-N300 Gigabit Cloud Router (DIR-636L)
- Monitor your wireless network from anywhere and blocked unwanted intruders in real-time.
- Get up to 300Mbps wireless speed- great for video streaming, Web surfing and much more, especially in medium-sized and large homes.
- Four Gigabit Ethernet ports for blazing and wired fast gaming and HD video streaming.
- Wall-to-wall coverage with built-in high power amplifier.
- Setting up your network is as easy as a few clicks in your browser or a few taps on your iPad or iPhone.
- Add devices at the touch of a button.
The D-Link Cloud Router 1200 (DIR-636L) provides total network management in the palm of your hand and high-powered wireless connectivity for your home.
List Price: $ 89.99
Price: $ 89.99
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Decent but nothing special,
The D-Link DIR-636L is a basic, single-band (2.4) Wireless-N router that would be well worth considering at a lower price, but its high price makes this relatively bare-bones piece of hardware hard to recommend despite its full-featured software. The router’s lack of dual-band support is a major deficiency for its price point, and it does not appear to be a very high-performance or high-reliability unit, exhibiting occasional lag and one crash in my first day of testing.
The router installs simply (though it somewhat unnecessarily asks to be connected to the Internet before you use its installation and configuration “wizards,” a poor security practice). It is easy enough to configure all its basic features through its Web interface, especially if you avoid the “wizards” (which force some poor security choices on you) and go straight to the manual configuration interfaces. Though the web interface is not especially well documented or self-explanatory, it does boast some nice features, like QoS traffic shaping, a storage server, and port forwarding, that you might not expect to find on such a basic piece of hardware. It also has a gigabit WAN uplink, which is nice for future-proofing in the event of a high-bandwidth home fiber upgrade, though I’m very skeptical that this low-end router would be able to saturate a gigabit connection in any case.
The DIR-636L also boasts “cloud” monitoring and access features, but after the privacy fiasco associated with Cisco’s “cloud” routers I elected to leave this off — and D-Link deserves praise for making opting out of their “cloud” a clear and easy choice rather than forcing it on users like Cisco/Linksys did. Still, it’s a bit ominous for privacy and security that these manufacturers’ cloud-based services are asking users (many of whom may not understand the tradeoffs involved) to irrevocably consent to the company’s remote monitoring of our home networks.
Users seeking support for alternative firmware such as DD-WRT or Tomato should also be aware that the DIR-636L is based on a Ralink chipset, rather than those firmwares’ preferred Broadcom chips, so it is less likely to be supported in future builds.
A few days’ use show the DIR-636L to be basically functional, though it needed to be restarted several times during configuration before it would work properly, and once more after a first-day crash. But at this price, a router should be less laggy (DNS forwarding seems particularly prone to hangs), higher-speed, and more reliable, so this is not my first recommendation. Instead, for a low-cost unit, try a Linksys E900 instead — its firmware is a bit less fully-featured but it’ll be at least as reliable — or pick up a used/refurbished E3200 or WNDR3700 and install DD-WRT firmware for far more capable hardware, better reliability, and more configurability at roughly the same price as this unit.
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|D-Link Wireless N300 Router,
I read mixed reviews on this product before I bought it and, I should say at the outset, I am not using any of the cloud services offered with this router. I use this router purely to access the internet and for remote work activities.
As a pure wireless router, it is working quite well. And, silly as it may sound, I like the fact that the router came with password protection enabled. In fact, the password was taped right to the router so I was up and running in minutes.
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