D-Link DSR-1000N Unified Services Router review

D-Link has a wide range of small and medium business networking products, including switches and wireless access points, but rather surprisingly it had no wireless routers designed for branch office or teleworking use.

This has now been rectified with the DSR-1000N Unified Services Router, a rather grand title for a dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi router with wired and 3G WAN connectivity, plus support for up to 70 IPSec VPNs and 20 SSL VPNs.

It's designed for locations with up to 50 users looking for a one-stop solution for internet access, remote access and Wi-Fi.

A compact, fanless unit with an all-metal chassis, the DSR-1000N comes with an 19in rack-mount adapter, or can be used as a desktop unit. All ports are front-accessible, comprising dual Gigabit Ethernet WAN ports, four Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, two USB ports and an RJ-45 serial console port (an RS232 adapter is provided).

Configuring it manually as a DHCP client for our cable broadband ISP was simple, but we also tried the internet connection wizard from the web management interface.

This is very basic, but does the job for less technical users. There are also wizards for the Wi-Fi settings and for creating IPSec VPN profiles.

There's no wizard for the second WAN port, however, which can be configured manually for a second wired internet connection, or for a 3G dongle plugged into one of the USB ports (at the moment, it only supports the D-Link DWM-156 dongle, which costs £59.99 including VAT). Printers and storage can also be shared via the USB ports, which may appeal to some small office or home users.

The second of the two WAN connections can be used for load balancing (with round-robin or spillover modes) or for automatic failover/failback for the primary WAN. It can also be configured as a dedicated DMZ port for running public-facing servers.