At the heart of practically every network now is a good wireless router. With one of these, you can do things that were practically magic just a few years ago: stream media, connect to all of human knowledge, transfer files, and everything in between. You might think that any old router can do that job, and you’d be right, but only insofar as you can call a box with four wheels a car. If you really want the best experience out there, you’re going to have to shell out a bit for a decent router, and they don’t get much better than the D-Link AC3200.
Design: 4.5/5.0
If you were expecting a sedate black box, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. This baby looks like it means business. With an extremely eye-catching red finish, unusual shape, and loads of antennae, this thing seems like it would be more in place on the deck of a sci-fi set than a current-era home.
It manages to be edgy without looking garish, and is all sorts of awesome to look at. There is an interesting set of diamond cutouts in the back for aesthetic purposes, and a vent up front, just below the strip along which indicator lights lie. I’ve never used the word “awesome” to describe how a router looks until now, but it’s wholly appropriate in this case.
Along all dimensions, it is a little large, at 15.23 x 9.73 x 4.7 inches, so you’re going to have to give it some room, but it’s really a nice piece of hardware, so you’ll have to resist the urge to turn it into some sort of centerpiece.
Hardware: 4.5/5.0
Where do we start? The AC3200 supports the 802.11a/g/n/ac standards, so you get broad compatibility across an extremely wide array of devices. You have four LAN ports on the back, a USB 3.0 port for storage, and a USB 2.0 port for sharing a printer, and a WPS button for painless setup. Six antennas stick out from either side of the device for maximum wireless coverage. It has an external power brick that is itself a little large, but manageable.
User Experience: 4.0/5.0
A wireless router isn’t useful if it isn’t more than a pretty face, so to give it the workout necessary to test it, I hooked it up to the office network, and played around. Setup was predictably easy. Just plug in all the necessary wires, connect, and you’re off. The config page is simple to navigate, and poking around to find the settings that needed changing was hardly a chore. Once I got the SSID and password set up, I connected all my devices and got to work.
My laptop, phones, and tablets all connected with no problem, from old to new devices. Range was likewise not a problem. While we don’t have a particularly large office, concrete walls can sometimes make the signal weak in some spots. This wasn’t a problem for the tri-band AC3200. Two 5GHz and a single 2.4GHz radios make sure every spot is covered for every device. The router then automatically connects each device to the appropriate band, to give each one the best possible experience. It looks great on paper, and in practice, actually seems to work. While far from a scientific test, the days it was up were regular workdays, with average load, and those devices on the router did actually seem to perform a little better with streaming and transfers, as well as slightly better loading webpages. I attribute that to the router’s smart traffic prioritization kicking in and optimizing the connection across the devices I had on. There were times I felt the router was smarter than some of the gadgets we had connected to it. It’s an odd thing to realize.
Large-format video streaming and gaming were likewise smooth and lag-free. While the overall experience for something like online gaming will mostly come down to the connection you have from your ISP, it’s nice to know this particular router can handle as fast a connection as you can throw at it. Local network tasks are also much faster, owing to the device’s 1GHz dual-core processor.
The USB port worked as promised. I plugged in an external HDD choc-full of movies and shows in 4K streamed it to various devices, and found myself killing time like it was nobody’s business. You can finally leave that huge drive in one place and still enjoy content anywhere on your network, without annoying lag or stutter. It even comes with its own app for that purpose.
Value: 4.0/5.0
While the AC3200 isn’t cheap at PHP16,000, it’s worth every Peso if you are really serious about having the most robust network possible. It’s fast, solid, and has more features than you have ever seen in a router before. It looks and behaves every bit as fast as it looks, and is worth the price of admission.
Bottomline:
I can’t look at our old router the same way again.
Also published in November Issue 2016
Reviewed by Ren Alcantara