D-Link DIR-300 Router

A slew of innovative features that make this wireless router stand out

amongst the crowd are'free Tomyzone hotspot', solid security and easy

installation. The hotspot feature lets you earn money by making a public SSID

that can be used by WiFi users in a particular area. It's restricted to

customers in New Zealand and Australia only. Besides being 802.11g standard

based router, that is also compatible with 802.11b network, things to look for

are simple installation and configuration. One can configure this router and

then save these configurations on connected machine (file name 'config.bin').

Now this file can be used in case configuration gets lost. For security, among

many features like MAC filtering, internal firewall, WPA encryption, one added

feature is parental control.

To check the performance of this router, we carried out two tests. First we

used 'Qcheck 3.0' to check the UDP and TCP throughput with 1000 Mb of payload.

This router was able to give results of 17 Mbps (UDP) and 21 Mbps (TCP)

respectively. When we compared these results with ASUS WL-520G (reviewed in

April'07) they are almost same. To check the speed of transmission, we

transferred 50 MB of data from a machine that was connected (to DIR-300) using

Ethernet cable to wirelessly connected laptop. The average time taken to

transfer this file was approximately 39 seconds even this is almost equal to

ASUS WL-520G.

Bottomline: It's a wireless G router whereas people nowadays prefer a

wireless N version. Also we hope the hotspot feature is available in India soon.