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D-Link Wireless N Router and Adapters
Introduction
Welcome back to the wide world of wireless. When we last left off, our band of 802.11g players were battling each other over speed-boosting performance enhancements that were strictly "off the books". As we have seen in the past though, advertised performance does not necessarily guarantee a win. As each manufacturer has tuned their products way past the standard, all of these performance enhancements have really left a clear winner. That winner has invariably been the manufacturer. Does this mean we, the consumer, have lost? Did we stumble briefly into the light of interoperability only to fall desperately back into the abyss of proprietary specifications? Wait, there might be hope! Alas, a new player has emerged, one which is steeped in standards, one which could work for everyone. Who could this be? It appears to be 802.11n. A new standard for the masses. Better range, better performance, and all interoperable! It seems our prayers have been answered and we can finally have the kind of wireless functionality we so desperately want. Does this sound too good to be true? Yeah, it is, there is always a catch. What could possibly be wrong with 802.11n? On the outside, nothing. The 802.11n standard should give wireless greater range and performance. The kicker comes when I tell you it isn't a standard, yet. The sets of technologies that make up the 802.11n wireless standard are still being hammered out. What this means is that all those products out there that are being advertised as 802.11n are actually being produced as Draft 802.11n products. Of course this probably doesn't mean a whole lot to the average person buying wireless. Most see the advertising on the box and go "faster and farther, why this is the product for me!". On the surface this probably isn't a terrible decision. Most buyers of wireless routers are probably buying all the parts at the same time and interoperability isn't the first thing crossing their mind. It is with this information in hand that I now begin to look at one of these 802.11n products. I have with me a full setup of draft wireless N products from D-Link. This includes their DIR-635 router, DWA-645 notebook adapter and the DWA-542 desktop adapter.   First Looks The wireless N line of products looks very similar to most other wireless products. There really isn't a whole lot that differentiates these from your standard 802.11g fare. The one difference that you probably would notice is the additional antennas on the router which sports 3 rather then the one or two on most routers. The desktop card sports two antennas rather than a single one. Other than the number of antennae, these are pretty standard looking products. I would like to say that I really like the newer styling D-Link has apparently started to deploy. The router is a nice sleek black color rather than the usual grey of past D-Link products.         For its part, wireless N, like wireless G is a new standard rather than an upgrade to an existing standard. Like past speed boosted products of the 802.11g variety which used MIMO technologies which stands for Multiple Input /Multiple Output. These types of routers usually had multiple antennas and increased speeds. Unfortunately, to get these speeds, you had to be locked into a single manufacturer since each speed boosting technology was proprietary to the vendor. As I have seen in the past, these speed boosted routers did indeed give greater speed when used with the same vendor product. When you bring another vendors product into the mix, you are left with a standard 802.11g product. 802.11n was designed to alleviate some of these problems. This would be accomplished by increasing speed, but maintaining a standard thus protecting interoperability between vendors. This is all well and good, but because 802.11n is taking so long, several manufacturers jumped the gun and produced Pre-N products. The 802.11n standard is still in draft form, so products are now labeled "Draft 802.11n" rather than Pre-N as in the past. All is not totally lost, it is expected that the 802.11 Draft 2.0 specification will be ratified by the IEEE soon. The official 1.10 standard was approved so we aren't far from the final 2.0 specification. Most manufacturers are hoping that a simple firmware update will be all that is needed to bring a device into full compliance. Of course this is probably true, but you never know. Obviously, the point of any review is to determine if the product meets expectations. Normally, I would consider this a simple concept. A product either delivers what it promises, or it doesn't. As has been seen before though, when discussing wireless speeds, the advertised speed is never near the actual speed given. So for this review I will modify my question and just simply ask. "Is the 802.11n product superior to the 802.11g product?" This will be the question of the day. To answer that question, lets start transferring some data!
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