Remember Pizza Hut? Australia doesn’t have many of the eat-in places with the red angular roofs left, but D-Link’s latest high-speed router reminds us of the old buildings, shrunk down and making your network faster at home.
Unveiled this week, D-Link’s latest evolution to the gadget every home network has in some form or another these days is also one of the most unusual looking gadgets we’ve ever seen, with an angled red glossy roof, and several antennas protruding from the sides.
The design is definitely something, and we’ll leave it to you to determine if it’s a good something or not, but it’s definitely interesting and will be applied to several routers coming out, not just one big shiny red one, and it’s really the performance and specs that should grab your attention more than anything else, because that’s where it counts.
For that, you can expect three ranges of wireless connectivity, as D-Link echoes the technology we first saw Netgear tread last year in the Nighthawk, offering one 2.4GHz network band alongside two 5Ghz bands, meaning more network performance could be sent out to gadgets in your home.
D-Link will have two of these coming, with a third Pizza Hut-esque router coming supporting only two bands, though two very fast bands at that.
Out of the two three-band routers, you’ll be able to find the AC3200 DIR-890L sending out 600Mbps on 2.4GHz, as well as two 1.3Gbps connections on the 5GHz band, while the more high-end AC5300 Ultra DIR-895L will deliver 1Gbps on the 2.4GHz band, and two 2.1Gbps (2165Mbps) connections on 5GHz bands.
That last one — the 5330Mbps of bandwidth (above) — is the largest amount we’ve seen on any router, and even goes beyond the Netgear Nighthawk’s AC3200 connectivity, sending this out over eight antennas that makes the red D-Link router look a little like a creepy spider, or an angry crab.
Dual-core processors sit inside both routers, the AC3200 relying on a 1GHz chip and the AC5300 using a 1.4GHz, and you’ll find USB 3.0 ports here, Smart Beam technology to better focus the wireless connectivity, and some new balancing software to keep the router’s speed working across all the devices in your home or office demanding its attention.
“We’ve set the bar for how a Wi-Fi Router should look and perform,” said Daniel Kelley, Vice President of Marketing at D-Link.
“Our new Ultra Performance Series has everything a demanding user is looking for – three bands of Wi-Fi, fast speeds, beamforming, and QoS – all housed in an attractive form-factor that is sure to make a statement.”
Local availability hasn’t yet been announced yet, something that you’ll find with most CES announcements, but you can bet that this one is coming, though it won’t likely offer a modem in its design, nor will it include a free pizza in the box.
