i just got a solwise SAR-600E which i read was good, but the bloody lan port on it doesnt work so i cant configure it(had a some old spare netgear and d-link ones luckily), i only require a router with portforwarding everything else is useless inc wireless for me, i wish they made fibre optic routers (cheap).

do you know the difference between the 2800 and 2900 ? considering the 2900.

on another not BT suck, i ordered classic 512k and got business max premium, max doesnt work properally on my lines as the distance is too great and too much noise, the last draytek i had though never worked properally (2600) line kept dropping because of the SNR or something like that.

any other options?

also considering the Cisco 837 CISCO837-K9-64 IP ADSL Router w/64MB Memory as it will more than likely actually work. just dont trust cheap **** now.

The 2900 is a cable router IIRC.

arh yes its just a ‘broadband router’ dont think it actually has a modem on it.

there is such a lack good routers with just the standard features, i've used, dlink - crap, netgear - crap, zyxel - extremely crap, linksys - extremely crap and now solwise - crap.

i'm starting to think a PCI card will be best.

Nice Review Steve - giving the Draytek the recognition I've been pimping for ages :D

Well I'm pretty happy with my 2600 - other than the VoIP would it warrant an upgrade? (no assed about the VoIP functionality)

I've never used a 2600, so I'm not in a position to say.

When you do future reviews of routers, it would be welcome if you could test their capability as well as just giving a run-down of the features.

Tom's hardware has a reasonable approach which gives an indication of how the hardware might perform under a typical barrage of bittorrent requests (something that might be useful to justify a £150 router rather than a £30 one). This doesn't necessarily mean using a commercial program like IxChariot (which Tom's admits has problems with SOHO routers in their standard NAT+SPI mode, so why use it?), but it would be useful to have an idea of how the router handled throughput at different numbers of connections.

Charleski, thanks for the feedback.

Performance is something we thought about, but unfortunately we don't have a DSLAM at our disposal, so don't have a controllable WAN endpoint* with which to perform tests.

Cable routers would be a different story, but with ADSL it gets a bit tricky.

(*and trust me, with my ISP, I won't be relying on theirs…)

Steve
I've never used a 2600, so I'm not in a position to say.

I'm currently operating a 2600VG at home with a number of 2600VGI models at work. Is it worth an upgrade??

The answer would be yes but not quite yet. At least not until my Internet provider (Nildram) is able to offer me ADSL-2 capability. For those of you who do not own a Vigor then I can say “yes, definately!”. The 2800 replaces the 2600 but adds the ADSL-2 functionality.

VOIP is a real godsend for me. As I run a business at home and the Vigor has two VOIP ports, I have registered two local telephone numbers. One as a fax number and one for the business voice line. As the VIGOR uses the industry standard SIP VOIP protocol you are not limited to a specific VOIP providor.

My personal VOIP providor of choice was sipgate.co.uk who at the time offered more functionality than Draytel. This may have changed but Sipgate have given me a high level of service so I have little need to look elsewhere.

Hardware VPN and Software VPN passthrough. Works as expected. My vigor regularly connects to a pair of Checkpoint Firewalls and has no problems using Cisco PIX software VPN or the Checkpoint SecuRemote software.

Microsoft Messenger and UPNP. Always used to be a real pain to configure for file transfers when in chat mode. Works like a dream on the vigor. Just turn on UPNP and start using MSN after a workstation reboot.

Well that's my two peneth on these wonderful routers.

An an FYI to everyone who has already commented in here. Draytek have now provided a response to our article under the HEXUS.right2reply initiative. You can find it on the final page of the review.

Picked up a 2800G here, had a few hassles when first installed but sorted that and its been faultless since even with quite a few big files passing through it…prolly would of needed half a dozen restarts on my old Belkin…
:)

I only have a little to say here… Draytek = win. Nuff said :)

I would be interested in how well the VOIP works, as potentaly it could be great and act as a least cost router on steriods.

Just think, after you sign up for a VOIP account, you tell the thing who is your telecoms provider, and what special deals you have. (frends and family etc). And then every time you pick up the phone and dial a numer it can work out the relative cost of VOIP versus BT, and route the call the cheapest. So for example, if you have signed up for a free local calls deal, it would not route such calls via VOIP.

It would also need to let certain types of call (emergency, operator etc) to always go via a landline.

i've been using the 2600v the past few days and it doesnt drop connection like it does on my other line (and this is on dsl max aswell - god dammit i hate bt). the web interface is also 10 times more responsive than any other router i've used recently (netgear and zyxel). i've just bought a house and will be moving in in a few months, thanks to samknows.com i found out that i am under 400meters from the exchange so fingers crossed adsl max should actually be worth it, and might consider bonding.

xrob
samknows.com i found out that i am under 400meters from the exchange so fingers crossed adsl max should actually be worth it, and might consider bonding.

I'm ~1 mile away from the one I'm moving to. Shouldn't be too bad.

Indeed, even more advanced features can be controlled through the console. A max ADSL downstream speed can be set, for example. This is handy for BT ADSLMax enabled exchanges, where sometimes poor SNR at higher downstream speeds causes line stability issues. The ADSL line we use trains to around 1.75MBps, but is limited elsewhere by the ISP to 1Mbps. Setting the max ADSL downstream speed to 1.2Mbps gave us a 5dB increase in the SNR, up to 30dB.

I saw this on Draytek's forum, but bottled out.

ANy clues as to how it's done guys? I'm not familiar with their command lines.

I'm getting drop out again :(

Open up a command prompt, run ‘telnet’.

Next run 'o ' and once asked enter the password for the router.

Now it should be a case of typing ‘adsl maxdnrate xxx’ where xxx is a number. I'm not sure quite how the number translates to downstream rate, but there are a few presets ranging from ‘8M’ to ‘3M’ or ‘0’ for auto.

Whenever you change this setting, the ADSL subsystem will automatically reset and retrain.

Just a quickie …

Will it remember that maxdnrate setting when the router is turned off/on ?

I see no logic reason for it not doing so… it writes all of its settings to flash memory.

8128(7150) - adsl maxdnrate 255
7968(7000) - adsl maxdnrate 250
7392(6500) - adsl maxdnrate 232
6816(6000) - adsl maxdnrate 214
6240(5500) - adsl maxdnrate 196
5696(5000) - adsl maxdnrate 179
5120(4500) - adsl maxdnrate 161
4544(4000) - adsl maxdnrate 143
4000(3500) - adsl maxdnrate 126
3424(3000) - adsl maxdnrate 108
2848(2500) - adsl maxdnrate 90
2272(2000) - adsl maxdnrate 72
1728(1500) - adsl maxdnrate 55
1152(1000) - adsl maxdnrate 37
576(500) - adsl maxdnrate 19
288(250) - adsl maxdnrate 10
AUTO - adsl maxdnrate 0

killban
8128(7150) - adsl maxdnrate 255
7968(7000) - adsl maxdnrate 250
7392(6500) - adsl maxdnrate 232
6816(6000) - adsl maxdnrate 214
6240(5500) - adsl maxdnrate 196
5696(5000) - adsl maxdnrate 179
5120(4500) - adsl maxdnrate 161
4544(4000) - adsl maxdnrate 143
4000(3500) - adsl maxdnrate 126
3424(3000) - adsl maxdnrate 108
2848(2500) - adsl maxdnrate 90
2272(2000) - adsl maxdnrate 72
1728(1500) - adsl maxdnrate 55
1152(1000) - adsl maxdnrate 37
576(500) - adsl maxdnrate 19
288(250) - adsl maxdnrate 10
AUTO - adsl maxdnrate 0

Thanks for that info. Mines been fairly unstable as its auto training to about 2.5Mbps (crappy line) with an SNR margin of about 7-8 but I've now set it to adsl maxdnrate 72 for 2Mbps and its settled at about 11-12 SNR so hopefully this should prove a lot more stable. Thanks.

Firmware 2.7.1 is out now, along with three alternative packages with different ADSL firmwares in them.