12.17.07

Never buy a D-Link WBR-1310 Wireless Router

Posted in personal, reviews, web at 10:25 am by danvk

I bought one from Fry’s a few months ago because it was the cheapest option and I assumed all wireless routers were more or less the same. Not so. You’d think the D-Link QA people would have discovered that this thing can’t maintain a connection for more than five minutes before it went to market. Here’s a smattering of reviews:

  • Strengths: the lights are really pretty with the rest of the blinking lights that make up my computer setup.
    Weaknesses: how about holding a connection for more then 2 minutes”
  • “Mistakenly, I didn’t check any reviews before buying it, but if you look, you’ll see the same thing over and over. The WBR-1310 drops its wireless signals, without fail, every 5-15 minutes. Not once, in the entire time I owned it (which was only 2 weeks untill I finally got fed up enough to return it) did it hold a signal for over 15 minutes.”

So do your research before you buy a wireless router! I bought a Linksys WRT54G to replace the D-Link, and have been happy with it in the past two days of use. The Wiki article says that this was the first wireless router to have its firmware open-sourced. As my roommate pointed out, that speaks volumes about Cisco’s confidence in this product.

3 Comments

  1. Evan M said,

    December 18, 2007 at 6:56 pm

    I believe it was open-sourced because they were forced to by GPL lawyers.

  2. Nathan Yellow said,

    December 19, 2007 at 1:08 pm

    I made a similar mistake back in college, I got a router that worked fine for one wireless device, but had problems with more. It’s surprising how finnicky wireless technology is; even with some of the best equipment (commercially) available now, things that use two wireless connections at once, like playing online games on two computers or transferring files between computers, can be incredibly slow or even impossible.

  3. Lingerie sets said,

    November 22, 2010 at 12:58 am

    wireless routers are very necessary nowadays because we do not want so many wires running around the home .~`