INTRODUCTION

   Although i know of many people, offices, stores and even companies that use plenty of standalone routers to complete their local networks to date I’ve always chosen modem/routers and smart switches over them for both my home and the lab. I can't really say if that has been the right choice since there are many routers out there with much better feature sets and Wi-Fi performance compared to even the best modem/routers available currently but at least in terms of space saving and ease of use the advantages are evident from the get go. Still with so many router models currently in the market promising lightning fast wireless speeds thanks to the new 802.11ac standard we feel it's crucial for all of you (including us of course) to know which of those models actually work as advertised. With us today we have one of the latest 802.11ac compatible routers to hit the market by D-Link the DIR-880L Wireless AC1900 Dual Band Gigabit Cloud Router.

   D-Link helps you connect to more of everything with our innovative approach to computer networking. From relatively modest beginnings in Taiwan the company has grown over the last 29 years into an exciting global brand offering the latest network solutions. Whether it is for the home consumer, business or service provider we pride ourselves on offering award winning networking products and services. We will continue to lead the way in building networks for people around the world.

   For the DIR-880L D-Link has used the Broadcom BCM4708A (running at 800MHz) CPU along with 256MB of DDR3 RAM, 128MB NAND flash memory and two power amplifiers by Skyworks (SE2623L/2.4GHz-SE5003L1/5.0GHz). Now as many of you know we've pointed out numerous times in the past that although much faster than all previous standards the new 802.11ac doesn't really support WiFi speeds of over 1300Mbps so once again in our hands we have a router that supports the simultaneous broadcast of two bands, 802.11n (2.4GHz 600Mbps) and 802.11ac (5GHz 1300Mbps) to achieve the advertised wireless performance number of 1900Mbps. The DIR-880L also features three 5dBi dual-band dipole antennas and supports beamforming technology (focuses the wireless signal where it detects connected devices) with Turbo QAM (for the 802.11n band) a feature which we've seen quite a few times in the past and basically "boosts" wireless performance to 600Mbps from the standard 300/450Mbps (just as long as the receiver supports it). Also available on the DIR-880L are 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports, Gigabit WAN port, USB 3.0 port (right side) and a USB 2.0 port (rear).