Welcome to my unboxing and first look at DLink's next generation premium router.
This is the DIR865L.
It is a dualband AC router. Now, I mean,
nobody consulted with me about this. Nobody asked me what I thought before
they called the next generation wireless AC.
I I can't understand why they didn't ask me what I thought, but I think it's just
the most ridiculous thing in the world because you got A and then you got B and
then we skipped to G and then we were like, well, okay, well, we skipped
letters before, so we'll go to N this time. And then they're like, "Oh, well,
there's all these letters left in the alphabet. So, why don't we just go back to A and put a C on it instead of going
with like, I don't know, wireless X for extreme or like anyway, wireless AC is
faster and more better." Um, particularly the 5 gigahertz band is
better utilized with wireless AC to be more faster and more better, but that
doesn't prevent these routers from being backwards compatible. So, this guy right
here uses Where we got? Yeah. So it has
combined 1300 AC plus 450N for a maximum
total throughput of it being capable of 1750 megabit per second which is very
very very cool stuff. And what it means is that unlike some other AC routers on
the market, this will not be a downgrade for all of your end devices. Cuz
remember guys, if you have a wireless AC router that's 1300 AC and only 150N or
300N, what that means is every end device on your network is actually going
to be operating at a slower speed than if you just had a high-end N router. So,
think about that for a minute. Be careful when you upgrade because if you
don't have any AC devices, you might be actually downgrading your wireless
speeds. So, let's see what else DLink has to say for themselves about this
guy. So, yep. Yep. AC and compliant
concurrent dual band 2.4 4 GHz and 5 gigahertz my llink cloud services share
port allows you to share you know files to various apps and whatever else you
want that's basically what they call a USB storage port um and then the mobile
app is what they call their mobile app that helps you share stuff anyway
integrated intelligent antenna with high powered amplifier gigabit Ethernet ports
USB 2 media QoS okay that's good
uh that pretty much covers it okay gigabit ports are 10 times yeah but I
mean it's hard to it's hard to call gigabit ports a selling point anymore.
For me, it's more like you just shouldn't buy anything with 1000 ports.
Fastest AC. Yep. Okay. And package
contents, my cloud services. Ah, so you can manage your home network from your
iPhone, iPad, or Android device. So, this is like Cisco's cloud connect,
except I haven't tried this one yet. So, I hope it's a little bit uh I hope it's
a little bit sort of more um easy to get around, I guess, would
be, you know, or maybe if you want to use it, maybe it's maybe it's more awesome. Check your networking speeds.
Reboot your router. See connected and blocked devices in real time. Okay, that's all kind of cool stuff. So, let's
go ahead and have a look at the router itself. It comes with a quick start
guide. Okay,
Amplify branding for this guy. So, I believe that was
what they used for their whole home router as well in terms of branding and
positioning. And in that particular product, it referred to the
directionality of the antennas that achieved helped it achieve better
overall range, which I did test and did end up being true, which is very cool
because a lot of the time, you know, you get like, oh, this wireless router is 10
times the range of your old one and you actually like plug it in and you're
like, well, no, it isn't. Um, because I'm using my phone now in the same place
I used it last time, and it's exactly the same.
This is a very shiny product, as you can clearly see. We can do the old like test
to find out how glossy it is. You can probably see that it will get quite
scratched quite quickly. But the good news is that it's a router, so if it's
ugly, it doesn't matter. And you can probably hide it somewhere. Anyway,
look, we can see Slick. Whoa. Oh my goodness. It's Slick. Holy crap. Um, for
those of you who haven't tuned in already, we do live streams every Friday night. And you can see Slick there.
Anyway, so what do we got here? Four gigabit Ethernet ports in the back for
your local network, your WAN port. So, you plug your modem into that. You got
your USB share port. Got a power button. Very nice. Hard reset switch, 12vt
input, and at the front you got a couple more things. So, you got power
indicator, interwebs indicator, as well as a WPS button. The bottom stand seems
like it should be removable because there's like there's plastic on it that
Hold on. Let me see if I can figure out how to get this off. So, I've never seen
anything quite like this before. There's two warranty void if removed stickers
here. And then they seem to be screwed into the base. And then um there's
actually like a plastic thing here that you'd probably want to remove somehow.
And I'm not Yeah, I mean you I guess you could get it off somehow, but it's just
sort of trickier. Okay. Okay, I got it. I got this.
There we go. So that's how that works. So there basically guys, what's the
point of AC routers? Well, they're faster. We don't have many AC clients
yet. However, DLink does have an AC1200 client. So, we're going to unbox this at
some point in the f Whoops. future. Hopefully, it's not broken now. Um,
yeah, it just makes your wireless go faster, particularly at slightly shorter
range. Remember guys, 5 GHz is a higher frequency. So, that means the wavelength
is much shorter, which means that while you can apparently carry more data on
it, it's not quite as effective over long ranges as 2.4 GHz. However, with
the improvements they've been making to antenna technology as well as the
transmission strength, 5 GHz has almost
caught up to 2.4 GHz to the point where I would personally, assuming I had AC
clients, take the benefit of the additional speed over the slight benefit
of more range. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look
at the DLink DIR865L wireless AC router.
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