Oolite Bulletins

OK, my old .11b Netgear MR-814 gave up last week after my years of faithful service so I bought a Dlink DIR-615 .11n - it had some good reviews and my boss has one and he's had no problems so I thought I'd be OK...

This of course has turned out not to be the case. Initially, it would report 5 bars of signal but my laptops would be kicked off and unable to reconnect without rebooting the router.

I have of course Googled the thing to death.

So far I have moved it - so it's no longer near my DECT phone base unit (It's now at ceiling height rather than table surface height). Changed a couple of buzzing low energy bulbs. Both these things have allegedly caused issues. So now it generally stays connected but is horribly "bursty" - I'll click on a link which times out and then when I refresh and it instantly downloads the entire page... Streaming works similarly - watching a video on Youtube - nothing happens for ages and then suddenly it'll start to stream and looking in Perfmonitor (Win 7) I can see that its now downloading at a furious rate in the background).

Dlink forums are pretty useless - they suggest turning off the protection (just for a while for testing) or dropping back down to WEP rather than using WPA/WPA2 - some other forums suggest using WPA rather than WPA2 but I don't have a choice with my version of the Hardware/Firmware - I only get nothing, WEP or auto select WPA/WPA2.

I have found a few forums that suggest giving up on the Dlink Firmware completely and reflashing with DD-WRT which seems a bit extreme but there are no firmware upgrades for my variant of the router.

Does anybody have any experience of the DIR-615 (D4 firmware v1.00VG) or DD-WRT firmware upgrades?

I'm slightly appalled that a shiny new router seems much less reliable than my really old Netgear on that would still be using if it hadn't actually expired...

Hi.
I have a D-Link Dir-655, and it has not been unproblematic, although it's pretty stable now. Issues I have had include:
Placement and interference as you describe. I used an app on my android to measure signal strength around the house until I found the optimal placement. Mine also ended up high (on the top of the book shelf, and moving it just 10cm horizontally made a surprisingly big difference).
Line issues. It's been very sensitive to noise on the DSL line. (I also use a D-link DSL modem). The symptoms I got was that the router would drop wireless and internet access connections. Then for some reason the LAN/Wireless would come back but not Internet. A restart was required to get Internet going. In the end, the Internet connection just dropped completely. I reported the fault, and my provider immediately found a fault on my line (high noise levels). After the noisy line was fixed 2 days later (they switched the line) the router has been stable. It turned out that my line had been on the limit for acceptable noise levels from day one (they tell you this afterwards) and then had deteriorated. So my conclusion is that this has been the cause of my drop outs. The line was fixed two weeks ago, so I don't trust it quite yet.

Apart from this and a few bugs in the firmware that I have been able to work around I'm now quite happy with the router.

I'm on Vermin Cable - oddly enough the router I have bought is accidentally loaded with the 1.00VG firmware (the seller didn't mention this although I did say I had cable so perhaps they just shipped the most appropriate unit?) which is apparently as a Virgin specific tweak to the standard Dlink Firmware which is why, when the router checks for upgrades it doesn't find any on the Dlink Website.

Oh, forgot to mention. Another thing which I did have problems with initially was letting the router automatically select b,g or n wireless as well as letting it automatically select wpa or wpa2. I had to lock these to the lowest common denominator amongst my wireless units. This was solved by the one and only firmware upgrade available.

I don't have an option to set my speed - it defaults to its one and only selection - "best (automatic)" - other forums have suggested dropping to G from N but I don't have that luxury.

I also can't select WPA or WPA2 I have an option for it to auto-select between WPA and WPA2

Very annoying.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I don't have an option to set my speed - it defaults to its one and only selection - "best (automatic)" - other forums have suggested dropping to G from N but I don't have that luxury.
I also can't select WPA or WPA2 I have an option for it to auto-select between WPA and WPA2
Very annoying.

This sounds like Virgin or possibly even D-Link trying to fool proof the router at the cost of functionality. Strange. I have a host of options for selecting speed, encryption, channel, frequency bands, guest net, VPN, etc. Not quite a Cisco, but I can pretty much override anything it does automatically with manual settings.

I was thinking the same thing.

Here is where they say good HW let down by poor Firmware and that I should flash with DD-WRT...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I was thinking the same thing.

Here is where they say good HW let down by poor Firmware and that I should flash with DD-WRT...

Hey, nice, I have a WRT54G at home as my backup (waiting to be binned really). It will now be tested with DD-WRT. I have never heard of this before.

It is a bit risky to flash a product still under warranty though. Have you considered to switch to the no-brand firmware, if at all possible that is, to see if that helps.

I have to admit, if my D-Link broke down, I wouldn't buy another D-Link. I would save up for a Cisco with proper multi VPN support, buy a VPN-proxy service in the UK and then I could finally use the integrated BBC iPlayer on my TV to watch BBC.