Set-up & Configuration

The DGL-4500's physical setup was easy: plug it in, connect the WAN port to the internet, and connect up to four PCs via the gigabit ports.

Next came configuring the router. The DGL-4500 ships with a default address of 192.168.0.1, which loads the web-based administration panel in a browser. The web-based administration panel gives two options: manual configuration, or a configuration wizard. Since I have a picky network, I opted to go with the manual configuration. They first thing I changed was the router's IP address to 192.168.0.2 since 192.168.0.1 conflicted with my cable modem.

The web-based administration panel gives plenty of configuration options for almost any networking feature the router supports. Some of the highlights are WISH, GameFuel, DynDNS, and Virtual Server

WISH stands for Wireless Intelligent Stream Handling, which optimizes and prioritizes packets over wireless. This is just another way the router is meant to improve household gaming. GameFuel, however, improves online gaming by prioritizing outgoing and incoming packets, making sure things like FTP, HTTP, and VoIP take a back seat to gaming applications.

The router supports DynDNS and Virtual Server, so I was able to set up a server and have ports such as 80 (HTTP) and 22 (SSH) point towards a specific machine. DynDNS support allowed me to link my router's IP address to domain name using DynDNS or another such online service, and it updates itself each time the IP address is changed. On top of these unique features, the router also supports wireless encryption using MAC address filtering, WPA/WPA2, WEP, and RADIUS.

The one issue I ran into there was the numerous restarts and benchmarks the router itself required. Changing seemingly trivial options required a full restart of the router, which sometimes lasted up to 30 seconds in length. Once the router re-established a connection, it usually benchmarked it's connection speed, lengthening the amount of time I had to wait before using the internet again. The features of the modem are fantastic, but I still want to see if there are any performance gains from this router, both with gaming, and with file transfers.