D-Link Forums
The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => Routers / COVR => DIR-655 => Topic started by: angelord on January 23, 2010, 09:03:33 AM
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Hi, all
I need to get a router to replace my old one. I am looking at DIR-655. But I've read so many negative reviews toward that router. So ass DIR-655 owners, will you recommend DIR-655 to other people? Is it stable?
Thanks
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Mines been running rock solid since October 2007.
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There have been a lot of problems with it, but it is still a really solid router. If you do buy one make sure it has 1.25 firmware and DO NOT update the firmare until the current FW debacle is over. Your other alternative is the WNDR3700, but it also has issues (which I consider worse than 655's). I would say it's a good buy, can run a really greedy network and run it well.
Buy one from a reliable retailer and if it doesn't work for your network then bring it back.
I should add that it probably has the best user support going. If you want your router to do something and don't know how I am pretty confident you will find the answer asking on these forums.
I've had mine for over 2 years and despite the problems am sticking with it because of it's pure power. It works well with everything from my server (which does all my bittorents a high speed) to my mobile phone. I need a router that works well under heavy load and this one does. Basically it's a five star workhorse that has been wounded recently by bad firmware written to make money from shrepoint.
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I'm having problems at the moment with Wake On LAN and my DIR-655... apart from that however, it's been fine. Solid performer.
I can't comment on the wireless, as that's not why I bought it, and my whole house is wired anyhow. As a gigabit router, it's very good.
Just don't expect any media servers you have to go into sleep and be woken over the network.
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I've had one since April 2007 (v.A3). It is good for what you get and has good standard features in its firmware like Static DHCP and Automatic QoS. I am one of the users who have been plagued with stability issues since fw 1.10 and includin 1.32NA. Wired performance and stability is great and likely one of the best for its class and price but the wireless issues would make me reconsider buying it if I needed a replacement. Also, I among others have encountered an ocassional P2P crash/reboot with this router from time to time.
Granted I am only using 802.11g gear, but 11g is a finalized spec. I am using WPA2 AES with auto channel scan and the issue has somewhat been corrected with newer firmware releases but is still occurs once every 4 hours. The router also randomly reboots every 1-2 days as well. I also appreciate that I should be using 5Ghz gear in my environment but Dlink and the IEEE 802.11 SIG should have realized that most people in the world live in densly populated urban environments and should have made 5Ghz compulsory in all 802.11 specs. 802.11n should have also require 5Ghz (and not the option for 5Ghz)
If you have the money, the Netgear WNDR3700 is the best router you can buy for wireless performance and stability. Netgear also claims upto 200,000 simulatenous TCP/IP connections and "unlimited" wireless clients. It is likely the best router you can buy if you want no fuss and do not want to replace it for the next five years. It also has an automatic QoS feature that is not based on Ubicom.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30925/96/
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_wireless/Itemid,200
If you don't need the wireless performance and will solely use wired, the DIR-655 is also a "set and forget" type router where you generally only need to configure the router once on the initial install. uPNP Port Forwarding also means you don't need to fiddle with. If you do not need a gigabit switch, the DIR 625/628 is a cheaper option that uses a slightly slower but still very capable Ubicom CPU. You should avoid the DIR-825 because it has even more problems than the 655 and does not work with the M$ xbox 360 wireless adapter.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30387/96/
If you do want the 655, the current hardware revision is the A4 so if you bought one new in stores, you would likely get this model. You should research that model more because they likely fixed some things. I know they changed the Wireless adapter from an older Atheros mini PCI card to a newer Atheros chipset integrated into the motherboard. Perhaps some wireless issues have been fixed.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30726/96/
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Thanks all for all the helpful information here. Most of my computers in my house are wireless connected to the router. So I will take a look at the netgear one. Thanks again!!
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Pender can you explain in further detail the P2P crash reboot issue? I think i might be having the same thing. Thanks.
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@brichter45
When I had many roomates who all used P2P clients for a continued length of time, the huge number of open TCP/UDP connections caused the router to crash and hang for a few minutes then would soft reboot the router, but the soft reboot did not purge the RAM and it still would act very slow when do anything WAN oriented. A hard reboot was needed. This would happen after a few hours of P2P use and P2P client global connection limits were not by any means overwhelming. I've encountered it recently and side effects usually include the Wireless connections slow to a halt while wired continue to work acceptably well (but not as fast as a fresh boot). This is not an issue with Tomato under the same conditions.
I believed this to be the case from the router logs. Now, as of this past year, even without any P2P use, the router seems to hang and soft reboot every 36-48 hours without a discernable cause judging from the logs. This could also be a sign that my router hardware is dying (have had it for almost 2 years), but many others are experiencing this same problem and it seems to be 1.3X firmware related. Also I have had this issue before with stock Linksys firmware where it would hang and crash completely after 5 minutes instead of several hours.
Overall I expected more from a $100-$120 single band router that claims to have a faster CPU than comparable 700Mhz MIPS architecture, with enough horsepower to do realtime uplink packet scheduling. It should have had more than 16MB of RAM for this class of router, especially since it is one of the few equipped with a gigabit switch. Also, this is one of the few draft 2.0 router models that has stood the test of time and has received universal acclaim (compared to Linksys' 6 month support of their 11n routers before pulling the plug). Since Dlink publishes and quotes the 655's accolades on the retail box and its product website over the last two years, I would have hoped Dlink would have continued to support their product better by providing more functional fixes and patches to the 655 firmware rather than feature additions. They had a real opportunity to improve product integrity and brand loyalty of their SOHO products and possibly gain a decisive edge in that sector but overall I think they blew it with far too few firmware updates that overall helped with some issues but mostly did not fix them. This is such a shame to see, especially when non commercial 3rd party firmwares that have a multitude of different hardware configurations to manage and support, can perform so much faster and stabler and be able to provide enterprise features to the masses without the resources of a large dedicated team from a company like Dlink.
It seems like Dlink has a mentality that they won't bother to fix a P2P issue because P2P is largely used for piracy. Firmware writers should give people an option in the firmware to tweak the connection timeout that way both the end users win and Dlink wins by being able to say their firmware does not terminate a legitimate connection that was idle for a long period of time unless the user modifies a setting.
I know this is not an appropriate area to rant but it doesn't seem like there will be a fix for P2P crashing or any type of stability fix. I also believe that most people who own a 655 and have been experiencing problems really want to love their 655 because it is almost a perfect router but the firmware updates are not bailing them out. The point is, if 3rd party devs can do it with ease and without reservation, Dlink and others most certainly can as well.
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You guys might want to consider a new thread for your torrent issues. ???
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Been using the DIR-655 since 2007 with very little problems. Rock solid performance.
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I came to the 655 from an Apple Airport Extreme N, which I've had for 2? years. The _only_ reason I was shopping was to get something with QOS. Pricewise, the 855 is probably more the competitor from DLink.
655 Pros:
- supports QOS, so my VOIP is much more usable now
- Less expensive
655 Cons:
- Firmware on this product is less stable than firmware I was using 2 years ago on AEXn (the only f/w bug I ever had with that related to DMZ, which had an easy work-around)
- Does not reach 300Mbps with my Intel 4965agn (the AEXn did).. yes everyone here says the fault is with the Intel part, but again, it was working at 300 for me with AEXn.
I have yet to sell my AEXn.. b/c I'm still not sure I trust the 655 enough. The 132beta09 seems pretty stable... if it had shipped with that I might be less hesitant.
If I were buying again, I'm not sure which direction I would go.
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my dir655 hasn't crashed for a long time.
then again, it's not in use. :P
haha
but it used to run solid until i started upgrading the firmware everytime a beta was released.
I don't know what firmware I started seeing problems but i'm sure if I searched for all my posts and stopped at the first post that described myself having problems and matched that against beta f/w release schedules, that would answer my problem.
anyways. um. yea.
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Rev A2 since early 2008 and Rev A4 since a few months.
Both are running without problems.
No P2P running, so I can't tell about it.
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Hi angelord,
I have no problems with the D-Link DIR-655 A3 Version with Firmware 1.21 w/ SecureSpot available but not being used.
Many people like Beta Firmware, but once installed, you can't uninstall it. In other words, if you install Firmware Version 1.3# numbers, you can't downgrade to the older versions.