Got the 878 a couple of weeks ago as an itch to upgrade from my aging 850L. With the 850L i somehow was never able to get a good reliable wifi signal in other rooms without using a range extender which brings its own hassles along with it, so i thought of upgrading to a router with actual antennae. The MIMO tech has piqued my curiosity for quite some time now and i finally bit the bullet and got this off amazon.
First unit received, buggy as hell. The router would frequently drop wifi connection altogether with all my devices as well as WPA2 password incorrect errors although the wifi leds on the unit itself were solid green. I read literally every single post on the dlink forums here for the 878 as well as it's brother 882 for a fix. Learnt about smart connect turned off. Tried turning off smart connect but then the 5GHz band would simply disappear after an hour even for a device right next to the router.
With time running out to return the product, i called up Dlink India tech support. Mind you, their tech support here is ultra awesome. I remember many years ago i wanted to resolve my double nat issues due to a dlink modem and a seperate dlink router. I just told them about nat and they sat down with me over the phone and helped setup the bridge on the modem and the dhcp on the router. Ever since i've been fan of sorts of Dlink products and vocally support them.
Coming back to the issue, the tech support asked me if i had factory reset. Since i had tried that before calling them, the next suggestion was to downgrade from 1.12 to an older fw which they said was an official fix to exactly the issues i was facing (wifi drops and 5GHz band dying completely).
I tried the downgrade but the issues showed up within an hour of me getting off the call with them. I quickly raised a return request on amazon and received a replacement fresh unit in 2 days.
≈Here's some of the interesting things i noticed throughout this whole ordeal :
Both units although sealed had a lot of dust inside the actual box and the unit. There is a noticeable amount of dust on the side antenna although the router was in a shrinkwrap sort of plastic film (like the one you peel off iphones). I'm quite surprised with two sealed units having the same dust issues which kind of rules out the possibility of a refurb being sent out to me. Maybe just poor quality control at the manufacturing plant?
For the second unit, i was literally about to simply return and ask for a refund but then reading through all these posts, tried something on my own.
Factory reset the router without configuring it manually or through the wizard.
Setup the router through the wizard and post setup upgraded the fw from within the router GUI.
Upgraded the fw to 1.12 and then immediately factory reset the router again.
Accessed the wizard and setup the router again.
Ever since this trick of double reset, the router has worked well. Smart Connect though is broken. I enabled it for a day and it brought back all the issues mentioned above wpa2 password suddenly wrong and kicking my devices off wifi, 5 ghz band simply disappearing (checked via wifianalyser app on android) and kicking devices sitting next to the router off wifi generally.
I went back and turned off smart connect and life has been good. The upnp implementation is probably not as good on this as it was on the 850L. Here if the router is rebooted, i lose open nat on ps4 and xbox. The xbox had a fit a couple of days ago getting strict nat for no reason. Had to shutdown the router and the bridged modem for 5 minutes and all's well now.
Thanks for furrynutz for being so responsive on these forums. There's a lot of uncertainty with the way this product works but atleast for now it's working well albeit with smart connect turned off.
One thing that i've learnt along with the double reset, is the antennae positioning. My house is a single storey apartment and all 4 antennae pointing vertically up didnt work out as well for adjoining rooms. What worked for me was the rear antennae slanted at 45 away from each other. And the side antennae slanted forwards at 45. This gets me brilliant signal.
Another thing i learnt while trying to fix the xbox strict nat and upnp unsuccessful issue, the reboot router from within the GUI doesn't work the way it should. An actual powerdown using the physical button does the trick way better than the software option.
Pros : Great range. I get full range bars in adjoining rooms and am able to stream online /offline content to two devices at once which my 850L could never do without hiccups.
Cons : Smart connect just doesn't like me. Upnp for gamers who are ocd about open NAT is a hit or a miss. The actual router is quite big which is the thing i loved the most about my 850L (it's just so cute and small
) LED indicators have a lot of light bleed through the plastic enclosure which honestly feels disappointing as this is not exactly an el-cheapo product. I paid almost $78 for this so poor build quality sticks out like a sore thumb. I prefer using Google DNS within the router settings and it frequently wipes out the saved google dns for no reason which points towards 1.12 fw not exactly stable.
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Topic: My experience with the 878 and lessons learnt - (RESOLVED) (Read 61240 times)