D-Link DI-704 Cable/DSL Internet Gateway user reviews

Summary Absolutely the best customer service, and at 3 am to boot. I read a lot of the comments posted here and agree with all the positive and NONE of the negative. The doc's for the router could have been a little better. My problem was that I didn't use the "clone MAC address" which a call to customer service revealed and was quickly taken care of. D-Links has absolutely the best CS I have ever called. No questions about where I bought it or was it registered, just good down to earth help. I will be putting D-Link products at the top of my list for new toys wanted!! I only wish I had used their NIC card and not the one from Belkin who has absolutely the worst warranty procedure I have ever encountered!

Summary I purchased the 704P. It is a wonderful and robust unit. All the positive comments are true! My 2 biggest complaints are that it divided my internet speed by 10! Without the gateway my 100BaseT-fiber runs at 7mb/s. Installing the gateway slowed my connection to 650kb/s. That a lot of UNEXPECTED overhead. I tried contacting customer support by email and by phone with NO response!!

Summary I have a cable internet connection and this thing constantly needs to be reset. I have to reset it about twice a week because I can't get on the web or even access the web configuration wizard. It really gets on my nerves. Then I have to enter in all of my settings again. It has gotten worse since I started hosting my own website.

Summary I got the router the other day and installed it this morning, OK, yesterday morning technically, around 20 hours ago. EVERYTHING works, printer sharing included and exactly as I imagined it - i.e. neither of my two machines needs to be on for the other to print to the printer. It was a snap to install and get the printer working. I did have a problem configuring the router and I called technical support. The problem turned out to be the fact that I had disabled the DHCP Service in my Windows 2000 on the machine that I chose to configure the router. Thus, it couldn't pick up an IP from the router. I had no problems getting right through to tech support at the 877 number supplied (toll free), and you get a tech support person from the start = real cool. First guy wasn't too smart, IMO. He had me try a mess of stuff and finally gave up and said he was going to escalate to a higher level technician and I'd get a call. Meantime I discovered that my other machine could run the configuration program and I set things up. Caveat! When you choose a password (if you DO choose a non-blank password to access router configuration), don't use more than 9 characters. If you do, only the first 9 are stored and if you try putting in your PW with more than 9 characters, you are rejected. I was about to call them for that (couldn't login) but I figured it out - put in the first 9. The next guy I got had me assign an IP instead of using DHCP for my problem machine. Then everything worked. While on hold I realized that my printer wasn't on their website's list of supported printers for the 704p. Bummer. Why? I asked. My HP4M is certainly designed to work with a print server - it's primarily a network printer. The technician said I should look for the item in the FAQ on how to set up your printer on the 704p. This does NOT involve using the driver supplied on the CD. It's just a Windows configuration thing. It works fine. The technician followed up our conversation by sending me a cool email with a number of very useful links. I'd say this is very good tech support. I reenabled the DHCP Service on my number one machine and reset the TCP/IP settings to get an automatically assigned IP and DHCP's working on both machines now. The pleasantest surprise is that my VPN at work is functioning - no tweaks necessary. Now I've got to figure out how to get file sharing working on my LAN. Got a great deal on this, about $40 at buy.com after $20 rebate, and I hear it's available for $40 - $20 MIR right now at Fry's! What a deal!

Summary I bought a D-Link 704 about a year ago and it's been working great ever since. The setup screens are easy to use, and the online help describing what all those settings are is pretty good also. The only problem I've had with it is slowness when I'm connecting to my VPN at work. However, I "temporarily bought" two other models of LinkSys routers to see if it was the D-Link, and they had the same problem only worse (couldn't connect at all to my VPN). D-Link is the only router I could find which "kind of" works with my office VPN, so I'm happy. BTW, more on LinkSys-- LinkSys couldn't even connect to my Verizon FTP site from the Win2000 FTP client-- I always get a "Connection refused" error. D-Link has no problem at all.

Summary My DI-704 works, but download speed goes down ~50%. I tried similar unit from one of competitors and it doesn't have this problem. Support vertually non-existent. It took me 2 month to exchange that unit. The wait line on the phone is typicaly 30min, they "lost" all 3 of my faxes and never responded to my e-mails. After half dozens phone calls they finally shipped replacement unit with the same problem. I will never buy D-Link again.

Summary Brought this router home, followed the quick install guide and was browsing in less than 1/2 hour. NOTE: Does not turn on firewall by default.

Summary this baby get's anything working it has usefull options such as virtual servers. there were no problems even to get on battle net!!! just a 10 sec configuration and youre done

Summary I got it, installed with no problems, collected rebate, enjoyed for a month, than it stuck(internet connection dead slow, lost packets...), switching off-on helped for a month(not bad!), same problem in few weeks, and soo on. Now I have to "power-off" it few times a day.

Summary Dlink has the worst tech support, as in NONE!! The DI-704 never worked right out of the box. It took 6 months to find a web broswer that could access the setup pages, then it worked for a whooping two weeks before it died and refused to reboot or reset...total junk....look elsewhere for a quality product from a company with a good reputation!! Buyer Beware!

Summary When we first got it, I had a few problems staying online. I called D-Link for support and they were very helpful. I was honestly going to return it after the 3rd try, but after the tech helped me, it stayed online and we didn't have any more problems with it. I would still be using it if we didn't go wireless last week.

Summary Runs circles around my friend's LinkSys. More features and includes a print server. Sweet!

Summary It appears to be total luck whether you'll love or hate this router. If everthing works perfectly - it's dead simple. If you have the tinyiest problem - you're toast. Tech Support in Canada is unreachable - busy signals for hours and then on hold for hours. Totally unacceptable service for a potentially complicated product. D-Link should feel utter shame for thier complete inability to handle high call volumes. After 6 hours of fiddling (I'm only somewhat router savvy) I got connected. Tips I learned... the web-based config interface REQUIRES Java Virtual machine (go to the Sun site to download it) before it will load. THERE IS NO MENTION OF THIS in any docs. Second, once configured for Bell's Sympatico HSE service, YOU DON'T NEED ACCESS MANAGER any more. You actually connect using the web based router config interface. This may prove to be more cumbersmome than helpful - but it appears that D-Links version of PPPoE is (slightly) faster than the notoriously slow Acess Manager. All in all this appears to be great value - $90 Canadian after rebates - but I can't recommend this to anyone who isn't totally self suffient for support - it appears that D-Link is incapable of helping customers. They've lost me forever as any kind of reference - I'd never recommedn their products to any collegue, client or contact.

Summary The network side of things was easy and setup quickly without trouble. The first one I got had flaky port connectors. The second one worked better, but loses the broadband connection at least twice a day. The print server works great on my XP machine, but their printserver software doesn't install the Dlink LPT at all on my Me system. So far their responses to my emails and phone calls is to copy and paste the same bit of useless information and send it back.

Summary It is discontinued and was left with a few bugs mainly browser based which will cuase it to crash. Konqueror will crash it and so will IE6 if you forget about that WAN proxy you setup. And it is slow with getting an IP using PPPoE. I have seen worse. Nice features like static DHCP to MAC mapping.

Summary The features offered on this router are great. The problem with it was it killed my download times tremendously. I was able to download at 350-400kb/s at good websites through my cable modem, but when this router was put in, my speeds went to 50-100kb/s max. It also had an annoying feature that would cause me to have to reboot it. The documentation listed this problem as being the result of an internet attack. I'm not sure I buy that reason. It sounds too much like a lame excuse for not coding the router to do this automatically.

Summary Configuration web pages slow to an abysmal crawl(10 -15 minutes to load!) after 3rd page. Power cycle required to get out of trouble. Support gave -0.0 help. I'm not a novice. This box doesn't desire to be on the market.

Summary I give the D-Link DI-704 router 4 Thumbs up for being a great router, if it wasnt for d-link, I'd be screwed right now because of hackers! THANK YOU D-LINK FOR A REALLY GREAT ROUTER !!!!

Summary I bought the 7 port version of the DI-704. It setup without a problem and worked fine and fast except it would loose the WAN (DSL) portion of the connection about every two days. I require an open connection 24/7/365 as I run a web site and mail server on my static IP. I cannot drop the connection. The LAN (internal) portion of the unit was stable. but the LAN to WAN (router) connection would just die requiring a reboot of the unit which takes about 2 seconds. Unfortunatly It's impossible to know when it drops the connection so I could have mail bouncing around the internet for days. Email support was canned responces and eventually they stopped responding when they realized nothing was helping. After one week it went back in the box and back to the store. Sorry D-link. I needed something more stable. I'm trying a Linksys BEFSR81. So far so good. Only one reboot the first day, Support had me change one setting and three weeks 24/7 and its rock solid and fast.