 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at D-Link's next generation premium router. This is the DIR865L. It is a dual band AC router. Now, I mean nobody consulted with me about this. Nobody asked me what I thought before they called the next generation wireless AC. I can't understand why they didn't ask me what I thought, but I think it's just the most ridiculous thing in the world because you got A and then you got B and then we skipped a G and then we were like, well, okay, well, we skipped letters before so we'll go to N this time and then they're like, oh, well, there's all these letters left in the alphabet so why don't we just go back to A and put a C on it instead of going with, I don't know, wireless X for extreme or anyway. Wireless AC is faster and more better, particularly the 5 gigahertz band is better utilized with wireless AC to be more faster and more better, but that doesn't prevent these routers from being backwards compatible. So this guy right here uses, where we got, yeah, so it has combined 1300 AC plus 450 N for a maximum total throughput of it being capable of 1750 megabit per second, which is very, very, very cool stuff and what it means is that unlike some other AC routers on the market, this will not be a downgrade for all of your end devices because remember guys, if you have a wireless AC router, that's 1300 AC and only 150 N or 300 N, what that means is every end device on your network is actually going to be operating at a slower speed than if you just had a high end N router. So think about that for a minute, be careful when you upgrade because if you don't have any AC devices, you might be actually downgrading your wireless speeds. So let's see what else D-Link has to say for themselves about this guy. So yep, yep, AC and compliant concurrent dual band 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz. My D-Link cloud services share port allows you to share files to various apps and whatever else you want. That's basically what they call a USB storage port and then the mobile app is what they call their mobile app that helps you share stuff anyway. Integrated intelligent antenna with high powered amplifier, gigabit ethernet ports, USB 2, media, QoS, okay, that's good. That pretty much covers it. Okay, gigabit ports are 10 times, yeah, but I mean it's hard to call gigabit ports a selling point anymore. For me, it's more like you just shouldn't buy anything with 10 hundred ports. Fastest AC, yep, okay. And package contents, my cloud services, ah, so you can manage your home network from your iPhone, iPad or Android device. So this is like Cisco's cloud connect, except I haven't tried this one yet, so I hope it's a little bit, I hope it's a little bit sort of more easy to get around, I guess, would be, you know, or maybe if you want to use it, maybe it's more awesome. Check your networking speeds, reboot your router, see connected and blocked devices in real time. Okay, that's all kind of cool stuff. So let's go ahead and have a look at the router itself. It comes with a quick start guide. Okay. Shopify branding for this guy. So I believe that was what they used for their whole home router as well in terms of branding and positioning. And in that particular product, it referred to the directionality of the antennas that achieved, helped it achieve better overall range, which I did test and did end up being true, which is very cool. Because a lot of the time, you know, you get like, oh, this wireless router is 10 times the range of your old one and you actually like plug it in and you're like, well, no, no, because I'm using my phone now and the same place I used it last time and it's exactly the same. This is a very shiny product, as you can clearly see, we can do the old like test to find out how glossy it is. You can probably see that it will get quite scratched quite quickly, but the good news is that it's a router. So if it's ugly, it doesn't matter and you can probably hide it somewhere. Anyway, look, we can see slick. Whoa, my goodness, it's slick. Holy crap. For those of you who haven't tuned in already, we do live streams every Friday night and you can see slick there anyway. So what do we got here? Four gigabit ethernet ports in the back for your local network, your WAN port. So you plug your modem into that. You got your USB share port, got a power button. Very nice. Hard reset switch, 12 volt input. And at the front, you got a couple more things. So you got power indicator, interwebs indicator, as well as a WPS button. The bottom stand seems like it should be removable because there's like there's plastic on it. Hold on, let me see if I can figure out how to get this off. So I've never seen anything quite like this before. There's two warranty void if removed stickers here and then they seem to be screwed into the base. And then there's actually like a plastic thing here that you'd probably want to remove somehow. And I'm not. Yeah, I mean, I guess you could get it off somehow, but it's just sort of trickier. Okay. Okay, I got it. I'm going to get this. There we go. So that's how that works. So there, basically, guys, what's the point of AC routers? Well, they're faster. We don't have many AC clients yet. However, D-Link does have an AC 1200 client. So we're going to unbox this at some point in the future. Hopefully it's not broken now. Yeah, it just makes your wireless go faster, particularly at slightly shorter range. Remember guys, five gigahertz is a higher frequency. So that means the wavelength is much shorter, which means that while you can apparently carry more data on it, it's not quite as effective over long ranges as 2.4 gigahertz. However, with the improvements they've been making to antenna technology, as well as the transmission strength, five gigahertz has almost caught up to 2.4 gigahertz to the point where I would personally, assuming I had AC clients, take the benefit of the additional speed over the slight benefit of more range. So thank you for checking out my unboxing. The first look at the D-Link DIR865L wireless AC router. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.