I am a media freak.

Let me say that again: I am a media freak. I am also a gadget addict, a power user who streams, downloads, plays online games and is generally considered by most ISPs to be a heavy bandwidth user and a general pain in the ass. Thus, I have used many routers in the past only to have them be unstable and crash even when flashed to latest versions. As an example of my normal usage pattern, I once had a router crash on me while I was bidding on Ebay; it reset and made me lose the auction, so in response I took a hammer to it.

I smash at thee!

Sure, I was running multiple machines on wired and wireless networks and even my iTouch (which is heavily modified too by the way), in addition to P2P testing and torrents. So what?

A friend of my father gave me a D-Link DIR615, Revision B2 router as he saw I could make better use of it than he could. I flashed the DIR615 firmware to 2.25, the most recent version while I was writing this, and let the testing begin.

I have my laptop and a Broadcom 125mbps Airforce G adapter (yes you heard that right - despite the fact that it sucks up my battery), my sister’s laptop with a Linksys wireless G adapter in PCMCIA, my modded iTouch 32gb that downloads like crazy (I installed a freeware app called MX tube that lets you download flash videos on the fly directly to the iTouch memory) and lastly my wired SuperServer 1TB (2×500gb hard drives with dual NICs) all hooked up to the router. Let the downloading, game playing, media streaming, app updating, web browsing, and file transferring begin!

Here’s the usage scenario:

• On my laptop with the Airforce adapter, I was web surfing, doing online banking, checking my email, chatting with MSN plus, and downloading HD movie clips from Apple HD.
• My sister was doing some web browsing on Facebook and uploading pictures and sending email.
• My iTouch was downloading videos with MXtube and had multiple lyrics downloading with multiple connections on another freeware program called tunewiki.

So far so good, but after all this load I was wondering why it hadn’t crashed and reset yet. So I said to myself: “Alright, that’s it, 30gb of movies onto my laptop via wireless-G.” This was done through simple Windows file sharing over the wireless network. Oh, did I mention that at the same time, I was also going to run the infamous Ares p2p program, all in the hopes of crashing this router.

The file transfer was successful. This was getting frustrating.

For each 8gb file it took about 53 minutes to transfer. The Airforced laptop was in the same room as the router and the other machines.

It didn’t even flinch. It was still stable.

Frustrated, I called up my dad’s friend and asked him where he got the router. He paid $95 CDN for it. I paid $129.99 CDN for the D-Link DI624 I was using prior to receiving the DIR615 and believe me, it crashed too, just not as frequently as the Linksys I hammered to a pulp.

In light of all this I wanted to reward him for such an awesome find. He took me up on my offer of helping him and his friend with computer problems. The next day his friend and another person gave me their machines to update and whatnot. You may ask why I am mentioning all this. The answer is: Because this was the setup for round two of testing.