As my Macbook Pro has a 802.11n chipset, I though it would be cool to swap my Linksys WRT54GL against a 802.11n ADSL router. Here is my experience.
As the goal was to get more speed with wireless, and my house is big with a load of tick walls with floors seperated by concrete plates, I selected a model based on online reviews of good speed and long-distance performance. It was the D-Link DIR-655. To get the 802.11n speed from my Macbook Pro, I had to purchase the firmware upgrade from apple.com. An easy and quick procedure.
The initial tests were OK, with speeds (SMB file copy) in range of 6-7 Mb/s, even if other people have got more than this. The signal we get from around the house is as well much better in comparison with the previous setup.
The router is easy to setup, and another good feature is the smaller latency, before, about 32ms to my mail server, now about 27ms. Seems small enhancement, but it’s more than 10% better, and in the latency business, every millisecond is good. Upgrading the firmware of the D-Link to the latest version (1.03EU) was easy. There is as well some automatic QOS which seems to do its job.
The only drawback so far is the lack of SNMP support. I contacted D-Link but their developers haven’t get back. I will try to write a curl script to retrieve some performance data and feed them to munin. Another issue is that the box doesn’t run any of the alternative firmware we know like DD-WRT. But as long as it does its job, I can live with this.
With time, I have noticed a lot of connection drops from my Macbook Pro. The kids Dell I8600 running Windows XP didn’t have the problem, so I went to Mac forums, and found a hint : disable IPv6. I tried it, and so far, not a single drop anymore. I sold my Linksys WRT54GL on Ricardo.
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