Product Reviews

D-Link's DSL-524T is an ADSL2+ router with a four-port Fast Ethernet switch and no wireless networking. While the lack of wireless may seem strange, there are a couple of reasons for its omission. First, ditching wireless brings the price of the product down, so it's cheaper if you don't need a wireless network. Second, if you already have a wireless router but want to upgrade to an ADSL2+ connection for faster speeds, you can buy this router and configure your existing wireless router as an access point. This keeps your wireless network the same and saves a few pounds on the upgrade.

As there's no wireless to worry about, configuring the DSL-524T is very simple and is further helped by D-Link's Click'n'Connect CD-based wizard. This takes you through a pictorial guide that explains how to connect the router to your PC and your ADSL line, before it configures the router. Its automatic checks make sure you have the router connected to an ADSL line before it continues and prompts you for your username and password.

Unfortunately, the configuration process

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doesn't turn on the router's firewall, so you have to delve into the product's web-based management system to start it up. This isn't much fun, as the interface is one of the ugliest and most difficult we've ever used. It has been very badly designed; the tabs running across the top of the screen have been resized from lower-resolution images, so the text is blurry and doesn't look very professional.

This could be forgiven if the DSL-524T were simple to use, but it isn't. For example, if you want to turn on UPnP, which is very easy to do on other routers we've tested, you also have to select which PVC, from zero to seven, you want to use.

Unless you're familiar with ATM networks, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that a PVC is a Permanent Virtual Circuit, which is the type of connection your ADSL line uses. It's very confusing, and it's extremely unlikely that you'd ever want to use more than one PVC, so we think that additional PVCs should be hidden away in an advanced menu. It also doesn't help that the manual says the default PVC is setting 1, when it's actually PVC0.

You need to remember this when you're configuring some of the advanced settings, such as virtual servers. These are surprisingly easy to configure, as D-Link has built the router with a set of default rules for all the common (and some less common) servers.

If you want anything more than a basic router, the DSL-524T is very difficult to configure and confusing for novices. It's also expensive for a product without wireless, so you're probably better off spending a bit more and going for the US Robotics router in our 'Also consider...' list below.