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[dark rider]

I recently upgraded to a DIR-825 that I'm getting ready to setup.  I know that the DIR-825 can handle dual broadcast of the 2.4ghz and 5ghz, but I wasn't sure if I'd see any benefit to using my existing DIR-615 as an access point and reserving the DIR-825 to 5ghz and N signals only?

Additionally, I'll be using a DAP-1522 in bridge mode in my basement.  The DIR-825 will be on the second floor office.  I tried the DAP-1522 with my DIR-615, and could get it to connect with a good signal, but it would randomly drop the connection (regardless of settings), so I figured it was time for an upgrade.  I'd like to use the bridge in 5ghz N mode for streaming of HD video and music, and reserve the 2.4ghz frequency (setup for all bands to support my legacy connections) for my typical wireless data network.  Is this the way to go, or should I just nix the DIR-615 and setup the DIR-825 in duo mode?  If i got that route, I believe it still shows up with two SSIDs, so could still just use only the N band over 5ghz and all bands over 2.4ghz?

[pcjunky]

How do you plan to have everything connected?  Hard wired?  A mix of wired & wireless?

In my house I rewired 3 of 4 the Cat5 phone lines to network connections.  My cable modem, DIR-655 and Vonage phone adapter are in the basement.  The DIR-655 is set for N only and supports the basement and outside in the yard for a laptop.

The DIR-825 is on the 1st floor used as a WAP.  The 2.4 GHz band is set for G&N to support 3 wireless cameras and 1 printer on the 2nd floor.  The 5 GHz band is N only for a laptop.

The network connection on the 2nd floor goes to a 8 port switch that's connected to 2 PCs and bunch of other devices in the room.

Initially I had everything on the 2nd floor.  Cable modem, DIR-655 and Vonage, but I didn't get the wireless coverage/performance I wanted in the rest of the house or outside.

You'll find the 2.4 GHz band has better range than 5 GHz so take that into consideration.  Use inSSIDer from metageek.net to find the best wireless channels to use on each router.  The usual fixed channel recommendations are 1, 6 or 11.  As lon***ou don't have neighbors that are really close you can probably set anyone of those for each router.  Just make sure channel width is set to auto 20/40 to get the best possible performance.  Remember each house is different so you need to do some testing to find the best settings and locations .

[dark rider]

I'm using far more wireless than wired connections.  The only computer on a hard wire is the office computer, which is hard wired to my router.  Everything else is pretty much wireless or wired to the Access Point for better speed.  Access Point will be feeding 3 (PS3, AVR, and HTPC) devices in my media room.  Additionally, we have 2 wireless laptops, PSP, DSi XL, Wii, 3 cell phones, living room BD player, and a network printer that all connect wirelessly.

If 5ghz signal isn't powerful enough for media room usage, I could move the bridge up to my living room and use the existing cat5 run to the basement and hook up a switch or even the DIR-615 down there to use as an access point for the 3 devices.  I'm assuming the DIR-615 would still work as a an AP if I feed it a connection from the DAP-1522 wireless bridge?

[pcjunky]

I only have experience with the DIR-655 and DIR-825, but it should be no problem to run a cable to one of the LAN ports on the 615.  Turn off DHCP in Network setup and UPnP in advanced network.

The other thing to think about is SSID's if you want a different one for each wireless LAN or try roaming with everything except 5GHz set to the same SSID.  I ended up using different SSIDs so I could have better control of which device connected to which network.  My wireless cameras aren't "smart" enough to search for the stronger signal. 

[thednobs]

If you have successfully run a DIR-825 with a wired connection to a DIR-655 as range extender/AP, can you please post your configuration details. I have been trying for days to get them working together but no joy yet.

Thanks

[dark rider]

I ended up forgoing the DIR-615 altogether.  My signal appears to be strong enough without it (averaging 82% on the 5ghz band).  I had a heck of time with the DAP-1522 though dropping signal and locking my router/internet connection.  I think the dropping was a result of firmware on the DIR-825.  I tried the stock 2.02NA, 2.03NA, 2.05NA and the DD-WRT.  The DD-WRT was the most stable (and obviously most feature rich), but I couldn't for the life of me keep a connection with manual settings for the DAP-1522.  In fact, my DAP-1522 did not like me manually editing any of the settings, unless it was first paired with the router through WPS.  Since, DD-WRT doesn't support WPS, I was stuck with the DLink choices.  Out of the 3, I found 2.03NA to be the most stable.  My ul/dl speeds were unaffected by any of the 3 firmware choices, so I'll probably keep running 2.03NA for now.  One glitch I noticed in all of the DLink firmware though was that DCHP came back with ip conflict errors, even when all my connections were on unique ip addresses.  Even after messing with all of the reservations, I still kept getting ip conflict errors, so I turned off DCHP, assigned static ips, and now all has been running smoothly for the last two days with no drops or errors of any kind.  It's a bit of a pain to assign a static ip address for each new component, but I can live with it, especially since there is a good chance that I'll max out the reservations at some point.   I'm now getting good 2.4ghz coverage for my laptops and portable gaming setups, and my media room is working great on the 5ghz band using the DAP-1522 as a bridge, averaging 15Mbs down and 2Mbs up out of my normal 25Mbs down and 3Mbs up at the router.