A couple months back I was looking for a good all around network router, preferably with both wired and wireless capabilities. After some research, I came upon the D-Link DGL-4300. It is touted as a “Gaming Router”, which basically means it has QOS (Quality Of Service). For those who don’t know, it is a configuration that gives priority to certain network traffic, but more on that later. Along with some other nice features the wired 4-port gigabit switch made this router stand out from the rest.

Setup and install was fairly straight forward using the built in web application. Cloning my computer’s MAC address and setting up the WPA wireless security took only several clicks. The DGL-4300’s web app control panel is laid out pretty well. For some reason D-Link thought they needed to include a bit of flash to spice it up unfortunately, it got slightly annoying as it loaded for each page as I navigated through the setup. It was fairly easy to setup all the port forwarding for my devices. The “Inbound Filter” allows you to setup groups of IP address to either deny or allow access to particular areas, such as remote administration and your other local network devices. Depending on your needs you can also set up filtering from the inside out such as Parental Controls and to block out particular ports. And course the router settings are protected by an admin password.

Overall the performance is respectable from the router. For the wireless antenna I replaced the stock antenna with the Hawking Technology Hi-Gain 6cBi Omni-Directional Wireless Antenna that I had picked up several years ago. I did have to down grade the wireless to support 802.11b (11 Mbps) only, due to an older laptop, but the slow down for the internet surfing is neglible and only becomes a noticeable if transfering files within the LAN.

If you already have a wireless setup/router and are looking to upgrade this could be a good option. I would recommend holding off though as speeds are being increased for wireless connectivity almost monthly. As of this post the latest release using MIMO (Multiple-input multiple-output) technology was 250 Mbps. One other recommendation is that if you do look to utilize these higher wireless speed connections, either buy all of the same equipment, router and cards, (e.g. all D-Link or all Netgear). This is because many times companys have their own proprietary high speed chipsets, and therefore might not work with other brand cards/routers.