D-LINK IS A well known brand in our country, and for a good reason. They generally make solid, no-nonsense devices that work well, all for a low price. The DIR 30Q is no exception. This was the cheapest router in the roundup, but it's well designed despite the low price. It looks quite good, and it is well put together, with no creaks or rattles from the box. It has a single external antenna, four LAN, and one WAN port. The status lights are easy to read, and overall, it's a nice package.

D-Link updated the Web-based interface for all their routers some months ago. This router has the updated interface, and it's easy to use and quite pleasant to look at. As you might expect, this router doesn't have any standout features, but it has all that is necessary: SPI firewall, port forwarding, VPN pass through, and so on.
It was in the perfor¬mance tests that the DIR 300 lost ground. The close range tests were in line with the rest of the routers, though slower than most with a maximum throughput of 10.6 Mbps.

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The distance tests were disappointing, with performance dropping off sharply even at a reasonable distance of twenty feet. It was the slowest router at this distance, which is quite surprising, given that it wasn't that bad at the forty feet distance. It may be that the antenna is transmitting a stronger signal horizontally (the twenty feet test was conducted a floor above the router's position), but we were unable to get Significantly better results despite changing the angle of the antenna. In its favor, it must be said that D-Link has one of the better security implementations, with performance actually increasing with WPA security turned on. The increase was slight, but noticeable, and with most other routers, we saw either no difference or a slight decrease in speeds.