D-Link DIR-890 AC3200 Ultra Triple-Band Wi-Fi Router Review

User Interface

Getting the D-Link Ultra AC3200 router set up, configured, and installed is an easy task, even for novice users. You will find everything you need to get started on the label that is placed on the bottom of the router and should that not be enough, then the included Quick Installation Guide will help you.

Initialization

Having navigated to the initialization URL with our favorite browser, we get presented with a welcome guide that will set up the router in four easy steps.

First the router will try and detect your internet connection which in my case worked like a charm and it got an instant connection. But I’m also on a simple DHCP connection thanks to my fiber optical internet connection and you might need to enter your ISP provided details here.

The next step is to set the password and name for your new router’s wireless network.

You will also need to define an admin password for the router itself. You should not chose the same password here as you did for your wireless network as that makes you extremely vulnerable to attacks.

Those were the few steps that are needed and anything else is really just optional. You can already reap the benefits of your new and powerful router now.

There is one more thing that you can do during the initialization and that is to connect the router to your mydlink account, or create a new in case that you don’t already have one. It is an easy way to connect to your D-Link devices from mobile gadgets such as smartphones and tablets.

After having set up the mydlink account too, or skipped it, the router is ready to be used and all it requires is a quick reboot.

Dashboard

Once you the router has rebooted, you can log in with the admin password you created during the initialization. The first page that you are presented with is the main dashboard that will show you the routers status along with the internet state, and how many clients are connected. You can just click on one of the icons and it will show the details below where there’s also a link to the settings of each page.

Clicking on the router will show your LAN and Wi-Fi settings including IP addresses, MAC addresses, SSIDs, and passwords.

The USB page will show which sharing services you have enabled as well as the connected drives. There is, however, no way to see which drive is connected to which port.

The client page will show the system name of each connected client along with the assigned IP and parental controls for the system. You can easily edit this by simply pressing the pencil for each system listed.

Settings

Where the first menu point with the dashboard only shows information, the settings tab will allow you to change it all. The first point you get to is the internet connection and its settings. I only need DHCP to get mine going, so that’s an easy step.

The D-Link DIR-890 also supports access point mode in order to extend your current network instead of acting as a router itself. This is probably not something that you’ll use such a great router as this for, but it is a great option to have.

The wireless settings can be handled as a single setting with the SmartConnect which is what is being set during the initialization, but you can also set the names and passwords for each of the bands yourself in order to keep more manual control of who connects to which band.

If Smart Connect is enabled then you’ll only have a single SSID and password for all three bands and the router will automatically assign the best to each client connecting.

A guest zone is a very useful feature as you can give your friends visiting internet access while you keep them out of your own private network. They most likely won’t need access to this, so why give it to them. They’ll want to save MBs on their data plan and that’s where the Guest Zone Wi-Fi comes into play.

Moving on from the wireless settings and onto the LAN settings, and we find nothing out of the ordinary. We got all the basic settings that we could want for the LAN interfaces including DHCP server, UPnP, and Multicast Streams.

There are two more points in the settings menu that also could have been placed as features. The first is the SharePort which is a great little feature. It allows you to use the routers USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports for easy sharing of media files from flash drives and to your mobile devices, PCs, and DLNA capable devices. The last one is for the mydlink feature which we already setup and connected. It is otherwise the same as the initialization version.