D-Link DSL-3590L review

D-Link has been making cylindrical routers for a while now, and the great-looking DSL-3590L is another example. It’s certainly one of the best looking routers we’ve seen, although some may prefer the more understated front of the DIR-868L. The DSL-3590L has a strip of green LEDs running vertically up its front, which can be a little distracting as they blink away to indicate activity.

One of the main differences between the two models is that, as its name implies, the DSL-3590L has a built-in ADSL2+ modem and there’s an RJ11 port for connecting to your telephone master socket. Usefully, it’s also possible to set one of the four Gigabit Ethernet ports as a WAN port to plug into a modem, should you find yourself changing to a cable or fibre ISP. You’ll just need to switch the router to Residential Gateway mode.

D-Link has greatly improved its router admin interface compared to previous versions, and it’s now far cleaner and more approachable. Settings, such as Quality of Service (QoS) or Dynamic DNS are all within easy reach.

The DSL-3590L also has two USB ports, one of which is USB3. These are compatible with D-Link SharePort, so once you’ve plugged in a storage device you’ll have a pseudo-cloud server for networked storage. With the mydlink SharePort app for iOS or Android, you can also access music, video and photos stored on your networked storage away from your home network. You can also access your files on your local network through UPnP and SMB sharing, and it’s easy to create up to 10 user accounts with various levels of access.

We came away slightly disappointed with the DSL-3590L’s wireless speeds. Its performance on the 2.4GHz band with our test laptop’s 802.11n adaptor was respectable but the rest of our results didn’t meet the lofty expectations we had for a router at this price. On the 2.4GHz network at 10m range it managed 43.7Mbit/s, dropping to 17.1Mbit/s at 25m. On 5GHz we saw a reasonable 158.5Mbit/s at 10m and 126.5Mbit/s at 25m, which is more impressive.

Performance with D-Link’s 802.11ac DWA-182 USB adaptor (£25 inc VAT from www.cclonline.com) didn’t blow us away. In 802.11ac mode we only saw 195.7Mbit/s and 158.5Mbit/s, which is slower that we would expect from a high-end router.

At this price, the DSL-3590L has some stiff competition from the similarly-priced Linksys WRT1200AC. The Linksys router is far faster in 802.11ac mode, but the DSL-3590L is superior if you’re going to use it with integrated 802.11n chipsets and has an easier-to-use interface. If you want an unobtrusive router to use with 802.11n devices, it’s a good choice.