Thursday, May 05, 2011

Review: D-Link EBR-2310 wired router

We had a router die at work. It was an old D-Link DI-524 that was pretty dependable, if nothing special, and it served us well for over 6 years. Surprisingly, however, that model is no longer made or sold in the US, so we got its current replacement... the EBR-2310.

The D-Link EBR-2310 has a nice black and silver rounded rectangular form factor that fits well on shelves or wall mountings. The RJ45 jacks hold ethernet cables in a secure and yet convenient to unplug manner.

That's all I have nice to say about it.

20 minutes after setting up the router, it walked down the hall, going from office to office kicking every user in the nuts and then shooting them in the head with a .45 ACP one after another.

Ok, that's not true, but it would have been less of a pain in the ass than what it DID do. Namely, go autistic every time more than 2 users attempted to transfer anything more complicated than an ICMP ping at the same time. Namely, increase latency by at least 300ms on all traffic. Namely, bring our internet connection and all critical systems to their knees, crippling our email, audio streams, and other must-have activities. It literally took me a week huddled in a dark, hot server closet over an eerily glowing sniffer to figure out there was absolutely nothing on our network that should be causing our problems.

We just got an absolutely crap router is all. Kind of sad. D-Link was never exactly top shelf, but its latest generation of products (20 minutes research online revealed many other people with the same experience on the entire suite of d-link wired and wireless routers currently on the shelves) seem to simply not be up to the task of actually... routing traffic. Which is... you know... kind of what you buy a router FOR.

So, unless you're the kind of net admin who likes the feeling of a weed whacker shoved up their backside and cranked to full speed, I would recommend you avoid the EBR-2310. If you ARE that kind of admin, dear god for the love of all that is good and holy get some counseling.

1 comment:

DimentoGraven said...

Dude, a d-link router... Really? I mean, seriously... You got a d-link and are surprised it's a piece of shit? Long since, we're talking LAST CENTURY, I stopped buying d-link because of the shitty quality of it's products.

I limit myself to purchasing LinkSys (Cisco owned) or Netgear.