By Trevor Tye
Over the last couple days the internet access in my house has been flaky and then one day it stopped working all together. Now in my house we only have one hard line for our phone and internet. So I called my internet service provider (Telus) to do some trouble shooting for the "line". What I got was a lot of none sense of unplug your computer, restart the router, restart the modem, blah blah blah, and so on. Nothing particularly helpful but I did find out that Telus was throttling my account and to my knowledge is still being throttled even though they lifted the cap for trouble shooting. Still I did test on the powerline adapters that I was using (via extension cord) and found that they were working fine so as far as I could tell it was an issue with our phone line that has be resolved magically. In any case I tried the this Dlink Wireless bridge to see if there were any other issues or if there is a problem with the internal electrical.
Setup
The setup was pretty difficult, it took about 25 minutes, and was mostly, due to the device having an issue detecting the network. Once I manually entered in the network the setup was very easy, but for someone with very little knowledge of networking and only a general working knowledge of computers they would find the setup very difficult indeed. There seems to be an issue with the soft rebooting of the device, so I recommend making any setup changes save them then manually unplug the bridge and plug it back in.
Performance
To my surprise the device is really fast and works magnificently with my DIR-655 Router. My network does feel a lot faster and since we only have a 15mb internet access we have a long way to go before we saturate the speed on the router and the bridge. We have a Wii, two other laptops and a PC with a wireless card. We have had no connection issues or interference yet. The device has performed much better then the powerline adapters. With the powerline adapters I had got about 8mb/sec download and with the Bridge/Access point I got 13mb, so about 1/3 faster.
Recommendation:
The router is on the main floor in our house and this device is on the top floor, I'd say about 20ft away through floors and walls, and as of right now I have had no issues (fingers crossed). So I would highly recommend this device for anyone looking to expand their wireless network. For techs it will be about 25 minutes to setup, for everyone else you might want to put aside about a half a day. I will put out a tutorial ASAP on how to setup and configure the device in bridge mode for expanding the network.
I purchased the Bridge from B-Com Computers in Edmonton for $103.00 + Tax
