I have heard a news about this router last week that it was the first sub $100 dual band router; it actually $119 MSRP, but only $79 on BestBuy. I’m so thrilled to get one to be able to achieve 300Mbps and don’t have to plug in CAT5e for Gigabit anymore. Although I don’t expect to get Gigabit performance with draft 802.11n, I still think I would get any better than 2.4GHz 40MHz channel width 802.11n that gives me 130Mbps connection regularly (but it’s only a bit better than 802.11g in practice)

Then I don’t hesitate to grab it @ Bestbuy. It really looks better than DIR-625 the one I have.

The selling point of this router is dual band; Dlink doesn’t forget to remind customers that this is dual band antenna as well =)

Setting up part was flawless like every router. Plug and Play; change WAN MAC address a bit; then you are good to go. I, however, tested this router as only Wireless LAN (802.11n) access point; I just connected this LAN to my main router (D-Link DIR-625) and disabled DHCP server on DIR-628 also.

It was very exciting to have 300Mbps via the air; imagine that was 3 times faster than Ethernet even though you would lose a bit throughput for header. Just so you know that this was 5GHz band and it’s the only way get 300Mbps connection with Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN. In a router configuration, there were choices of only 802.11n or only 802.11a or mixed. I tried with only 802.11n and both. I haven’t found any different though.

Yep, there is no difference at all. From 2.4GHz to 5GHz, the speeds Windows reports were different, but it’s different story in practice. I don’t have any scientific result for this since I copied back and forth between my Thinkpad X61T (802.11n) and my media center box (Gigabit LAN) several times. What I got was only about 4-6MB/s and 7-8MB/s for copy from and to media center box respectively for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz mode. There is no reason to test for that low performance; it’s so disappointed because it’s only 48Mbps and 64Mbps which were only about 802.11g theoretically speed. At least, I expected to see 100Mbps throughput (approx. 12MB/s) for 300Mbps connection. Just so you know, I got over 40MB/s via Gigabit LAN, so sometimes, most of the time in fact, I prefer to plug the cable in at all time. It really has a significant difference, no lag while transferring data since most of my data were on network drive. I hope final 802.11n would gain what it aims soon. When the time comes, I’m ready to switch immediately. Now, I just have to return this and stick with what I already have.

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