Review D-Link M15 Eagle Pro AI AX1500: A little silly can also be very smart

One thing I’ve realized over the last 18 months is that I live in an area without Wi-Fi: An apartment with double brick walls where other networks are broadcasting on almost every side, resulting in a cramped atmosphere. .

In 2019, I was Google Nest Wifi for one rotation. It’s great in the townhouse environment, but it fails miserably in the new apartment landscape. In the end the extension point refused to never connect after a minute or two – despite the hard reset and network rebuild – which left me praying to the Google gods to provide part of the program facility can fix the problem.

It never came, but D-Link M15 Eagle Pro AI AX1500 . Mesh Wi-Fi System did.

When the D-Link system is up and running, it works great and I don’t miss the Google system for a minute. Wi-Fi 6 in itself is a much-needed upgrade, especially when it comes to new hardware alongside your old Wi-Fi 5 network support.

The problem is its reliability and its inability to provide 100% uptime, which is like 99.9%, which mathematically only gives less than 2 minutes of downtime per day. This is useful because when it comes to light work, it usually takes a minute for the restore to happen, which eventually renders it unreliable. When a power outage occurs, ethernet connections follow it, as the device performs a complete reboot.

The overwhelming feeling is that one wonders if the connection will last for the entire video call or if the movie won’t stop this time. Finally, one morning it kept resetting every minute and had to factory reset and rebuild the network to get the main unit working properly again.

Some form of relief came when D-Link shipped part of the beta firmware it was hoped would solve my problems. In short, it’s almost gone all the way, but the point is what it reveals.

After years of being in the Google world, the options that users can change are clearly not good, to the point where Google has replaced the more fully featured Wifi app with integration into the less feature-packed Home app. more power. Users just trust that Google’s intelligence is enough.

The hype surrounding what AI is, D-Link considers any smart feature to be smart – like “optimizing” the network which I believe is a fancy word for switching channels – but luckily, it also retains the standard HTML settings pages that have existed on consumer modems and routers for decades.

Importantly, this not only means that users can manually download new firmware, but it can also prevent the system from automatically upgrading in the future. There are many people in the Google support forums who wish to have such luxury.

Another area where D-Link beats the Google system is cost. D-Link’s system with the base and two repeaters is AU$350, while Google’s pack of 3 costs AU$550.

One area where Google is still interested in D-Link, however, is in apps. Google’s app isn’t powerful enough but works well, D-Link’s app can never remember my credentials and always asks for location permission – this is used during setup, but The application will not open if you refuse.

While in Google-land it will be a deal breaker, it’s simply a minor annoyance, because of the old HTML settings around and that’s all the app basically does. are adjusting. The only addition the app seems to offer is a weekly report on your network’s performance, which it naturally claims is powered by AI, and it essentially validates your Wi-Fi environment. how bad i am.

After living in a world that computers know best, it’s a relief to be back in a world where humans can transcend programming and control their own networks.

My situation is not perfect, but it is improving. There’s probably a combination of settings that will prevent the repeaters from falling apart from time to time, because when this net fires on all pots, it’s fine. For now, though, it’s enough just to be able to surpass AI’s intelligence with some appropriate human stupidity and take charge of the network.

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