D-Link G415 Eagle Pro AI AX1500 4G smart router

At a time when 4G internet connection prices are equal in price to fixed line NBN connections, it’s undoubtedly a great time to think about alternatives if you wanted some portability to your internet service. This is exactly what you get with the newly released D-Link G415 Eagle Pro smart 4G router. If you spend most of your day working from home, you may wonder if you really need a 4G internet service as opposed to a fixed line service. Nevertheless in these modern times, the use cases are limitless. For starters, if you’re one of the poor folk unable to get a fiber NBN service to your premises, a 4G internet service would provide much better throughput in most instances in comparison. The beauty of having a cordless broadband service is you no longer are stuck to a single premises for continuous Wi-Fi connectivity plus the additional smart features the D-Link G415 offers simply adds the icing on the cake.

Features

• 4G LTE CAT4 Connectivity at up to 150Mbps
• Wi-Fi 6 (802.11AX) Support up to 1500Mbps
• LTE Bands: 1 / 3 / 7 / 8 / 20 / 28 / 38 / 40 / 41 (2100/ 1800/ 2600/ 900/ 800/ 700 / 2300 / 2500 MHz)
• UMTS / HSDPA / HSUPA Bands: 1 / 8 (2100/ 900 MHz)
• GSM/ GPRS/ EDGE: 3 / 8 (1800/ 900 MHz)
• One dedicated Ethernet WAN port with automatic failover
• 3x Gigabit Ethernet LAN Ports provide optional wired connectivity
• Built-in standard-size SIM Card Slot
• AI-based Mesh capability with compatible AI Wi-Fi devices
• AI-based Wi-Fi and Traffic Optimiser monitors and improves your network automatically
• Supports WPA, WPA2, and the latest WPA3 Wi-Fi Security
• Voice control compatibility with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa  

Unboxing and closer look

The D-Link G415 comes in the standard blue/white color schemed box which clearly displays the capabilities of the router.

Opening up the box, you’d find the G415 neatly packed and accessories placed at the bottom. D-Link offers a network cable, two external 4G LTE antennas that handle up to 150Mbps down and up to 50Mbps up, power adapter and a quick start guide.

A standard sized SIM card slot is offered where you simply slide in place your SIM card.

At the front of the D-Link G415 you’d find the standard LED indicators along with a mobile signal level indicator as well.

3 LAN ports and a single WAN port is provided for fixed connection points and connection points for the external antennas.

Setting up the G415

The Eagle Pro AI mobile app available on both Android and IOS makes the whole installation process a breeze. The quick startup guide is detailed enough for any non-tech person to quickly set things up. In our case, we simply inserted the SIM card in place, and turned the unit on.

On the initial setup screen the router will prompt for the type of internet service you will be using. The beauty of the D-Link G415 is that you can use it on your NBN connection as well as mobile internet or have both with one service acting as a fail-over.

Configuration wise, apart from setting the standard Wi-Fi passwords and System admin credentials, there was nothing else to do. The router will simply reboot to ensure all new settings are applied and that was it; the G415 was online using the mobile service. It was absolutely a hassle free process.

You can fine tune the mobile service if so you desire, but 99.99% of users wouldn’t require any changes here.

The auto fail-over feature would certainly intrigue some of you. If you’re running services that requires uninterrupted internet service this would be an ideal solution to have in place. You are able to define the fail-over checking mechanism to include a DNS query, ICMP ping or a combination of them. The fail-over would auto switch between primary and secondary and wise versa in the event your primary internet service goes down.

Basic parental control features are offered but as per our previous experiences on this we found that the website filter would only work on certain browsers such as chrome. It would not work on Firefox during our testing and you need to manually block each website. This isn’t a practical setup nevertheless it’s available if you wanted some level of control.

Wi-Fi 6 and Mesh Connectivity

The D-Link G415 offers the benefit of Wi-Fi 6 connectivity catering to modern devices. The Wi-Fi band can also be expanded from 80MHz to 160MHz, effectively doubling the channel width for faster connectivity between your devices and the Router.

The G415 supports AI-based Mesh capability hence if you wanted to easily expand your coverage with other compatible devices, this feature makes this process seamless. Read our review on the D-Link M15 Eagle Pro (3-pack) for a unit you can easily integrate with the G415.

You can enable the AI Wi-Fi optimizer service which scans your Wi-Fi surrounding and transmits on the best channel to avoid signal interference.

Conclusion

Having FTTN NBN service, we were pleasantly surprised the speeds that were achieved on our mobile service. In fact the speeds were much greater than the fixed line service we have, however the catch is you’re restricted to a data cap depending on the service offering. One of the main improvements I would suggest D-Link consider making is to make this unit truly portable by offering a standalone battery option as well. This would make things so much more versatile.

Nevertheless, the D-Link G415 is not any ordinary 4G router. With its Wi-Fi 6 and smart AI technology offerings it’s a solid power house which is capable of handling upto 128 devices. Another unique feature we found was you can have both the mobile and NBN fixed line connections working at the same time. At a price tag of AU$299.95 D-Link have uniquely positioned the G415 in the mid price point compared to 5G routers which retail around the AU$500-600 mark.

D-Link G415 4G smart router

AU$299.95

9.3

Build Quality

9.1/10

Performance

9.3/10

Features

9.2/10

Value

9.5/10

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