D-Link DIR-615

For small local area networks such as home environments, where you need to split the Internet access to all your personal computers, a wireless router like D-Link DIR-615 would be the best solution, as it functions as a standard wired router and wireless simultaneously. This means that if your family members or small office colleagues use 2 desktop PCs and 3 laptop computers, a wireless router gives Internet access to laptops via Wi-F, and to desktops via a standard network cable, or wirelessly if you have a wireless adapter. Wireless adapters can be cards integrated in the PC unit or devices attached via USB connectivity, and the latter ones look like classic USB drives.
After getting the adapters and the D-Link DIR-615 wireless router, you’ll need to configure the service set identifier and radio channel, which must be the same for all the computers in your small network.

D-Link is the world’s leading provider of routers and the DIR-615 model is a wireless N router type, which makes it ready for the upcoming wireless standard, allowing up to 248 Mbit/s data rates, a high increase from the existent 54 Mbit/s provided via the 802.11g standard. It accomplishes this by supporting multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver, and 40 MHz operation, which increases performance significantly, without needing extra bandwidth and power.

D-Link DIR-615 connects different devices wirelessly including gaming consoles, desktop computers, media players, and notebooks, while providing parental control for Internet activity supervising, network firewall protection, and backward compatibility with the 802.11g standard.

D-link wireless routers are easy to setup because they come with the friendly Quick Router Setup Wizard with step-by-step instruction, to setup the network in a few minutes, including the security level.

With Wi-Fi Protected Access and Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 programs, you can secure both an older wireless network and the ones using newest network cards, against serious weaknesses. These protection standards developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance use RC4 stream cipher encryption with 128-bit key and 48-bit initialization vector. The Temporal Key Integrity Protocol changes keys dynamically, every time the system is used, while the message authentication code makes it more difficult for intruders to break the network as it uses the complex Michael algorithm, which prevents even replay attacks with a frame counter.

More than these, D-Link DIR-615 has dual active firewalls called SPI and NAT, which raises the protection level. Stateful Packet Inspection is in charge with keeping track of travelling network connection and distinguish legitimate packets matching different connection types. The ones not matching known connection states are rejected automatically.



Maybe you’ve heard about the term “NAT router” before. It referrs at the process called network address translation or IP masquerading, which consists of modifying network address information in datagram packet headers durig traffic routing. The point is to remap a given address space into another. This protection methid, or hidding method, cause annoying problems in Peer 2 Peer network connections, so it requirres experienced configuration to not stay in your way. NAT routers hide private network addresses behind another’s public address’ IP address, so that, on exit, the IP packets appear to originate from the router.

The D-Link router supports IEEE 802.11n, 802.11g, 802.3 and 802.3u standards, providing 4 10/100 LAN ports and one 10/100 WAN port, 2 External Reverse SMA Antennas, access via Internet Explorer, Mozilla and other Java-enabled browsers, featuring power LED, status LED, and measuring 4.6 x 7.6 x 1.2 inches at 0.7 lbs.

It is available at $80.