D-Link DSL-3580L review

We tested the router with both our laptop’s integrated Centrino 2 wireless chipset, which supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, and D-Link’s own DWA-182 USB Wi-Fi dongle, made to support the same AC1200 standard as the router itself. Unfortunately, 2.4GHz performance was poor, and no amount of tweaking of settings on our part made for any notable improvement. Both integrated chipset and dongle failed to maintain a 2.4GHz connection at 20m, but the dongle performed best of the two, achieving 74.1Mbit/s at 1m and 62.3Mbit/s at 10, compared to 50.4Mbit/s at 1m and 45Mbit/s at 10m from the Centrino 2 laptop.

The best results we got were on the 5GHz band with our laptop’s integrated Wi-Fi, which achieved a very good throughput of 83.9Mbit/s at 1m, 74.6Mbit/s at 10m and 43.3Mbit/s at 20m. Using the D-Link dongle at 5GHz, we were unable to maintain a connection at 20m but got 60.1Mbit/s at 10m and 93.2Mbit/s at 1m. Performance was our PCI-E Wi-Fi adaptor at 5GHz over 20m was 54.5Mbits, which is decent but not particularly notable.

Priced at around £100, the DSL-3580L is a little cheaper than most other 802.11ac ADSL routers and even compares well to some 802.11n dual-band routers. However, its somewhat intimidating interface and poor performance over long distances means we’d rather spend more on the BT Home Hub 5 instead.