DrayTek Vigor 2860 Router (6-Port, Gigabit Ethernet, 200 Mb/s)

A really good piece of kit, has all the bells and whistles you need for an office environment. It has a large NAT capability so handles 200+ devices chattering away without any problem. Transition between ADSL and VDSL just worked when we had the line converted to a FTTC connection. It gets a severe beating every day with the demands made of it with a combination of mobile devices, desktops, cameras all requiring NAT to get out on a single IP address. It has never hung up once!An annoying thing is that some configuration settings require it to be re-booted and you don't know that until you've made the changes and then there is no option to day OK I'll come back to that later. If you have several changes then sometimes each one can result in a re-boot. Configuration changes therefore have to be done out of hours. It is however quick to re-boot, the OS is back up and singing in about 10 seconds. The ADSL/VDSL just takes as long as it needs to train and sync just like any other bit of kit., so you can be offline for a couple of minutes.Done some testing with the IPV6 capability but not run it in anger until we swap our ISP to one that offers IPV6. What I have seen so far looks good, but until we run it in anger I can't comment further on the IPV6 side of it.Overall a very reliable and flexible bit of kit for the price and handles a tough busy configuration without a murmur. If you are the one responsible for Internet connections in your company or home stuffed stuffed full of gadgets, just go for it as it won't let you down.

Session Based Load Balancing - AwesomeMy family are a bit greedy with the bandwidth. We had 20 Mbs VDSL and this wasn't enough so I ordered a second BT infinity line. I was planning to get a specialist company to glue the lines together by line bonding. It is otherwise possible to load balance without bonding, in this way, many routers can balance traffic sent down each line but each session cannot be split over both lines. This standard method of load balancing improves efficiency but does not increase or add line speed. Draytek have something called 'session based' load balancing which does split traffic across the lines and the speed of the two lines becomes additive. The only downside I can see is you have to setup a route policy for https addresses to force them down one line so that online banking works (a minor exercise for which there are instructions on the Draytek website). This works to double connection speed without paying for line bonding - its awesome there is not much info on the web on this and some scepticism but it works perfectly.I pumb one VDSL line into this router and the second into a Draytek Vigor 130 modem with plugs into WAN2 of this router with ethernet. The advantage of using a Draytec modem is the line speed of WAN2 appears in this router removing the need to ever log into the modem.The setup is rock solid and actually relatively simple to set-up

I wont repeat what has been said in the positive reviews as this is clearly a competent router with masses of functionality, and I'd probably buy it again. However I think there are few major issues worth pointing out:- There are masses of settings and the interface is not particularly intuitive. Its targetted at small businesses but I'd be surprised if people can set this up to make use of any of the additional functionality without using an IT specialist or the helpdesk, more on which later.- The user interface can be downright unfriendly. If you're doing any kind of longish job such as setting up a number of reserved IPs ("Bind IP to MAC" in vigor parlence), it will time out at some point without telling you, and when you finally hit "ok" you'll loose everything you've done. I set mine up 3 times and I only had 7 to do. Converserly, as mentioned elsewhere, it decides when it reboots after changing some settings and there's no option to delay it until later.- The quick start guide is hopelessly short and only covers setting up the WAN side. However the Draytek arrives by default with DHCP turned on, so if you do that after adding it to an existing LAN you'll obviously end up with 2 DHCP servers running which wont work. There's no mention of how to set up the LANs in it, and its not that straightforward: it took the helpdesk nearly an hour to sort mine out.- telephone support only runs 9-5.30 5 days a week and charges 5p/min + telco access charge. However, it will only help you with connectivity (clearly its not just me that finds it hard to get set up.) For anything else, incl "network planning", you need Premium Telephone Support at 78p+ telco access (still only 9-5.30 though!) This is provided by a 3rd party and comes with a raft of T&C and warnings. I didnt try it.- I also didnt try email support, mainly because I saw a few reviewer comment that they didn't receive a reply from it.- Alternatively you could read the full user guide. Alt 899 pages you might expect this to be more helpful but unfortunately it does not go much further than a line by line description of each setting, without much in the way of overview or typical example setups, etc (example: "To choose PPPoE as the accessing protocol of the Internet, please select PPPoE from theWAN>>Internet Access >>WAN1 page." At least the quickstart tells you when to use PPPoE.On the plus side the non-premium helpdesk was very helpful and knowledgeable, and went a little beyond the advertised scope. Overall however Id say its a 5* product for functionality but drops 2 for quality of documentation and user support, which has to be near the bottom of the industry and probably makes the product unusable for much of its target audience without purchasing additional help.