Customer Reviews

D-Link DGL-4100 4-Port GamerLounge Broadband Gigabit Gaming Router

5 star:		(78)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

This router hands down is a solid performer that beckons to be on radar. Configurability, performance, stability, firmware updates, D-Link has made a huge statement in a world of cheap routers that freezes, frustrates, and basically ridicules users that demand more out of their internet connection. Not sure if my Cisco CCIE VoIP certification makes any difference to this review but I can honestly say with what I do both at work and at home, I expect network device to perform to their specification and more. I also play hardcore online MMORPG with 5 accounts running through this router, no lag, no hiccups, performs like a star. A Router's first priority is stability, this thing is so solid, I wonder if there is something wrong with it. Without stability, nothing matters. With stability non-issue, next comes performance. When I prioritize my MMORPG traffic to 1 (highest priority possible), regardless of how many Torrent traffic in the background, or the 10 or so desktop/laptops that running in my home, this BEAST can take it. Functionality? I bought the LAN only version, no wireless, and I hook up my old Linksys Wireless-B router, disable DHCP, and this D-Link automatically detects, AUTOMATICALLY re-routes its network path internally, and can broadcast wireless network as an extension. READ: ease of use. Other functionality includes being able to lock down every MAC address easily, and assign easy to understand NICK NAMES to every individual laptops/desktops MAC Address with great organization and quick lookup for network troubleshooting. I like the ease of setting up Static IP assignments for key Gaming PC/Laptops that can be easily tracked, monitored, and configured for QoS applications. Though not as robust as professional software but I am able to track all TCP connections with their corresponding ports all in one convenient page. I am able to see if my little brother is downloading/uploading porn and shut it down if I pleases. Last but not least, the last update allows the router to update ANY/ALL changes WITHOUT requiring the router to REBOOT. THAT shot my rating up to the stars.

This is a great router for the price. It's easy to configure and the documentation is pretty good. It explains the routing pretty well. What sets this router apart from others is the quality of service settings (QoS) that allow you to prioritize ports for bandwidth usage. You can set your streaming music or game ports to use a high priority and thus never get cut off by maxing out your bandwidth. This alone makes it worth the price.

One thing to note: if you're on a Mac and try to configure this router through safari (It's web page configuration) it won't work because of a bug in safari. Use Firefox and you'll be golden.

(Yes it works on Macs.)

In the 4+ months I've owned this router it's handled everything I've thrown at it, without even a hiccup. DSL, VPNs, QoS, heavily configured SPI firewall & filtering, Bittorrent, XBox Live etc etc. And unlike some other manufacturers I could mention, D-Link continues to release regular firmware updates/improvements for their products.

The DGL-4100 has a very small footprint, generates next to no heat and its LEDs are blue and very bright. I guess the only word of caution I'd give is that it lacks a CLI. Administration is done via a set of built-in HTTP/Flash pages, accessible from any web browser. Personally I much prefer this GUI interface (no cryptic command lines to learn), but more hardcore network/telnet types may object to it.

And BTW, if someone is having the exact same problem with three different brands of routers, their routers obviously aren't the problem.

I bought this router to replace a wireless router to become the main WAP and LAN interfaces on my network.

I now run a wireless access point off the router, as well as a Linksys phone adapter-router, two gigabit switches, two print servers, several computers and a network hard drive.

The router was simple to configure and had many, many options to enable my Vonage internet phone router to access the internet without interfereing with my other computer tasks. I was also able to easily make several configuration adjustments for my network.

I got this router as an upgrade from a Microsoft MN-100 router. Basically the MN-100 was just too slow. Networking between our four home computers was too slow. And worst of all, downloading from peer to peer networks invariably caused the MN-100 to crash.

Some people gave this DGL-4100 router negative reviews. I guess it all depends on what perspective you are coming from. For me, this router has proved to be everything I hoped it would be.

The peer to peer downloading has improved tremendously. No more router crashes. The download speeds are now up to some 280 kb/s with uploads about one-tenth of that (my DSL connection isn't that fast, as you can see).

I plugged in my existing Speedstream 5100 which I had gotten five years ago from my DSL provider and it worked fine. I'm not sure what the other reviewer's problem was with his Speedstream 5100 DSL modem. You do need to know what your DSL settings are. But, it's not that hard to set up a standard PPOE DSL connection - you just need to plug in your userid and password.

I was also looking for some way to control the internet usage from the various family computers, and this router has an excellent set of Access Control tools which allow you set up any number of blocking schedules so that Internet access from certain computers on the network can be blocked for certain periods of time. The MN-100 had this feature also, but for some reason, it did not work reliably for one of the computers.

There are also more sophisticated filters such as a web filter, inbound filter, and other filters that that I have not had a chance to explore. You can set the web filter so that it only lets through a certain list of websites that you enter in manually.

One complaint that a few reviewers have lodged is that this gigabit router does not do jumbo packets. If you are a connoiseur of gigabit routers/switches, the ability to do jumbo packets does speed up the network traffic even more, but considering that I was coming from a 100T router, this one does network transfers so much faster that I'm not complaining.

More recently, I expanded the number of ports available on this DGL-4100 by attaching a D-Link DGS-2205 5-port switch. This router automatically detects the devices plugged into the 5-port switch and assigns router addresses as if the ports on the switch were part of the original router. You don't have to input anything, just plug things together and it all works automatically.

Overall, an excellent upgrade from my first ever 100T router. If you are looking for something even more sophisticated, there may be some nits to pick, but then you'll have to pay much more to get something with more professional quality.

I loved and hated the settings on this router. It is very customizable and is the best and easiest I have used to turn on and off ports to foreward for a game. It swiches quickly and easily and even stores the ports you foreward for certain games on their for you so you can just check or uncheck the enable button to turn on and off that service. The router doesnt even seem to require a reboot after changing the port forewarding settings which is nice. The router reliability was MUCH better then my last one (I was using an fvs114 which required reboots every day)

Downsides are that I get annoying error messages every so often saying something like "error missing a ; in line 107." I just had to keep hitting cancel for it to go away, but when I went to another menu it came up again. Also using safari (i'm on a mac) doesn't work well while trying to configure the router. Some of the buttons just wouldn't work for me so I had to use my pc or use firefox for my mac.

Another annoying thing is that I couldn't get vpn to work with the router for a while. I was able to fix this by unchecking the IPsec option under the router settings because I guess it was conflicting with my vpn client. The number of preferences it has is a negative here because it takes a while to test all the settings and scrounge through the manuals to find the way to fix the issue.

I bought this router because I was trying to get (2) X-Box 360's running on my single cable internet connection. This was something I could never do with my previous router. It works flawlessly Setup was as easy as plugging it in Done! I can now run (2) X-Box 360's on the same connection, host a match and be downloading music on my computer at the same time with no problem at all! I WOULD HIGHLY RECCOMEND TO ANY SERIOUS GAMERS!!!!

...and it is starting to freeze up as well. I'd avoid the H/W Ver A1 as it seems to be prone to problems, if their tech support is to be believed. Router works great, and does seem to reprioritize traffic as advertised... for about a day. After that it freezes tight as a drum (no response through the web admin page) and will only work again if hard reset. This is the second one to show the same symptoms.

On the plus side, a breeze to set up. One wizard and a plethora of configuration options. Most of the recent games are available through the pulldowns in the gamefuel section. Really well designed and thought out, just not very reliable. Yet. I hope.

This looks like it could be a great product if D-Link can resolve these freezes.

I signed up for [...] VoIP service but experienced bad call quality with my existing router (Linksys by Cisco WRT54G2 Wireless-G Broadband Router). The new D-Link GamerLounge router solved that problem for the lowest possible price.

I guess this router is called "GamerLounge" because network games require a low-latency network connection. I'm not a gamer, but I appreciate the solid Quality of Service support (QoS), called "GameFuel". I can give priority to VoIP traffic, by assigning priority 1 to UDP traffic on ports 5060 and 5061. This solved my VoIP call quality problem.

This is a wired router, with no Wifi support. Because my old Linksys wireless router was doing a good job for Wifi, I simply hooked it up to the D-Link router in "router" mode (rather than "gateway"). So the D-link is now doing Network Address Translation (NAT) and DHCP, and the Linksys only does the wireless connection. If you need a wireless router with QoS, take a look at D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router.

Having it only for a week, I can't say much about durability. However, the router stay very cool in vertical position.

The only disappointment with this product is that Amazon dropped the price just days after my purchase :-(

I am very happy with this D-Link DGL-4100 wired router (D-Link 4-Port GamerLounge Broadband Gigabit Gaming Router). I had a very specific problem that this router solved. I was previously using a Linksys BEFSX41 router (Linksys BEFSX41 EtherFast Cable/DSL Firewall Router (4-Port 10/100 Switch / VPN Endpoint)) I bought a few years ago. I bought a second XBox 360 recently and discovered that I could not play XBox Live where both XBoxes were online at the same time and were playing the same game simultaneously (specifically, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, one XBox would always indicate that it had a "Strict NAT" and one or both XBoxes would get unceremoniously kicked out of the game after a short play session). For my situation, this router solved that problem in an easy plug-and-play way without the need for any technical router configuration solutions, e.g, port forwarding or triggering, enable uPNP, DMZ an XBox, or any of the myriad (and unfortunately at times, conflicting) suggestions found on the Internet.

Moreover, my old Linksys router would drop my internet connection sporadically all the time (once or twice every day or two) which required a process of unplugging and replugging the DSL modem and Linksys router to re-establish connection. No big deal once or twice, but a bit of a pain to do it ritually so often. I used to think it was because of my DSL provider, but since I have gotten the new router, there have been no dropped connections. On another topic, FYI, although reliability is improved, I did not expect nor did I experience any improvement in connection speeds (unlike another reviewer), in my case, it is comparable to the old Linksys router (as measured by [...]/speedtest and CNet's bandwidth speed test). Very happy with this router, because for me the best router is one that you set up and it just does its thing in the background and doesn't require much fussing and fiddling. Hope this review was helpful.