D-Link Wireless AC 1200 Mbps Home Cloud App-Enabled Dual-Band Gigabit Router (DIR-850L)

So far, this has been a great router tho installing was quiet Difficult due to the very short length of the power cord. Shortest I've ever seen & was a total pain. I see they sell a longer cord separately which I think is tacky of DLink. I installed the same model router the week before mine for a friend & we had such difficulty also w the short power cord. But, the most frustrating part was working with Dlink support. The internet light in front wud never turn on so after 3 calls to DLink, they finally came to the conclusion that the Ethernet cord was no good. We had to have the router working that afternoon so had to go to a retailer & spend $26 on an Ethernet cord. DLink never said they wud send us one or reimburse for the one we bought nor did they ever say sorry that they shipped us a router w a bad Ethernet cord. They weren't rude, they simply didn't seem to be concerned. Bought a 2 year replacement warranty from Squaretrade as I was left feeling a bit shaky about the life of this router.

I've been using D-Link products for my networking. Bought this router 5 years ago and it's been going strong since. I haven't had any issues with it.I just recently upgraded to the D-Link AX5400 and no issues with that. I'd recommend D-Link products as I haven't had any issues with them so far.

I upgraded from an expensive Netgear running DD-WRT because my WAN to LAN throughput was being throttled. I recently upgraded to gigabit and wasn't getting close to that on my old Netgear. No offense to Netgear, it was partially a problem with DD-WRT that's been thoroughly documented. That firmware just does so much computation that the speed is throttled if the hardware can't keep up. This is understandable, and this D-Link worked to solve that problem.This D-Link is capable of some fairly amazing speeds. It was rated at about 900 Mbit speeds for WAN to LAN. As soon as I got it home I snapped in my ethernet ports and clicked that speedtest button. When I saw 830+ Mbit coming back across my screen I knew things were better.I configured the router to use a static external IP, it didn't have a problem with that. I set it up to do port forwarding as I run a number of services on my network that need to be externally accessible. It gave me a number that I could have. I was surprised it would limit it to ~25 or whatever it said. I don't run that many services, or I don't manually require that many ports to be open, but I was close. This could be a limiting factor for another user, so beware.I got the wireless setup, but knew I didn't have any AC devices yet. My N still looks good on there; I got enough speed on my phone and iPad to know it was an improvement, despite no external antenna on the device. Honestly, my coverage was spotty directly above the device, one floor up, so I laid the router on its side and tried again. I saw SIGNIFICANT improvements. I don't know if this is because of how it broadcasts, I didn't make the thing, I'm just saying I had success with it, maybe you can too!I had a friend with a newer MacBook Pro come over to see what the AC was actually capable of. Long story short he got mad at me because he got 200 Mbit faster on my wireless than he gets at his house using an ethernet cable.The interface reminded me of every D-Link I've had in the past 5-7 years, except faster. You could tell that the chip running this router is a bit nicer than what I'm used to.I tried to find a reason to only give this router 4 stars, and couldn't think of one. It works well for people using up to 25 services. It works well for the casual user. It works well with old hardware and wireless technologies. It's not ugly. It's not too loud. Five stars.

Unit over all is only OKAY.First thing I did was upgrade the firmware to the latest stable version 1.10WWThis unit is hardware revision AExtremely weak signal vs to really old smc unit and 5 year old linksys unit.Very disappointed because I purchased it to enhance my range not reduce it.I do not have the 5ghz running so possible that is a factor to consider. We have phones, Android devices and laptops that don't support 5Ghz.It had a ton of features available to manage your household it if you need them, like VPN IPSEC PPTP, QOS, etc.But nothing that DD WRT would not give you on a cheaper unit with more management optionsMy advice to you is pass on this unit if your house is like mine and has older 2.4Ghz devices and get a unit with actual antenna if your looking for coverage of a moderate sized home.I will report back when I get 5 Ghz Devices and let you know the signal strength with those.

The router is really easy to setup for most of the usual items like PC, Laptop, Smart Phones and iPads.I discovered that my my Roku 2 xs player could did not connect automatically. Roku 2 player was working excellently with my previous router Linksys E2000. I called up Roku Support to get the problem resolved (Roku works on a channel 11 of the router).But I still face one problem. I am trying to setup a media server. I am using Twonky Beam. But some how the router is blocking the device discovery. Just to be sure that this is not a software problem or my iPad problem, I installed it on my iphone and same problem exist. Then I tried the Roku remote for iphone (Same media server different software). I am facing the same challenge. My device is not getting discovered over the wifi.So any one who is looking to buy this product, please consider the above constraint. I will try to connect with the DLINK support (not easy to find a support) for figuring out a solution. If I find a solution, I will update it in my post.Update 30-Sep-2013I have returned this item and bought a Netgear AC Router from Costco.All the above issues have gone. So looks like there something which is blocking the Roku Remote for iPad to cast the channels from iPad.Hopefully this review helps for people with casting needs.