DrayTek Vigor 2820 router

This Swiss army knife of routers bristles with features that should mean that it costs a lot more than it does.

Price from: £155
WAN: ADSL 2/2+/10/100 Base-TX/3G
LAN: 3 10/100/1000 + 1 autocrossover, NAT
VPN: 32 IPSec, L2TP and PPTP Tunnels
Firewall: SPI, DoS/DDoS, IDS, IM/P2P, DMZ blocking, URL filter
WiFi: 802.11b/g/n WEP/WPA/WPA2
Additional ports: USB and two phone ports
Power Supply: External
Power Consumption: 8W typical

The DrayTek Vigor 2820 series of routers has some very special combinations of features that make them well worth examining. The 280DVn reviewed here has built in VOIP support and is top of the range. The other models in the series have similar capabilities but have ISDN options. Notice that of the four LAN ports only one is a Gigabyte port. This is reasonable if you see Gibabyte connections only as a way of creating trunk connections between the router and other devices, a switch say.

What is special about this router is that it has not only an ADSL connection but a standard Ethernet WAN port and a USB socket that supports a 3G USB modem. The WAN port and the 3G modem cannot be used at the same time and their purpose in life is to provide a backup to the ADSL connection - although they can be used in load balancing as well. You can use the USB port to share a printer but this might seem to be an underuse!

The router is set up via a web interface. There are wizards to set up the connections but these mostly ask you to supply the same information that you have to know for a manual installation. You have to set up WAN1 which is always ADSL and WAN2 which is either Ethernet or 3G. You also have to specify how you want the two connections to work together. You can regard WAN1 as backup for WAN2 or vice versa. This extends to load balancing and failure. That is, you can set WAN1 to take over if WAN2 fails or to help WAN2 if the traffic is too much, or you can set WAN2 as the secondary connection.

This makes it possible for the router to provide an ADSL backup for a fast Ethernet or cable connection. Equally it allows for a 3G connection to back up the ADSL connection or another ADSL connection to back up the first ADSL connection. WAN2 supports both PPPoE and PPP so that you can connect a DSL modem and perform an ISP logon. The documentation also shows the router being used to set up a mobile coffee shop offering its customers WiFi access using a 3G modem!

This is all very flexible. You can also shape the load balancing by allocating IP and port addresses to different WAN ports. Both WAN ports support NAT and you can create up to four VLANs. The 2820 supports all the things you would expect from a more sophisticated router - including fixed routes, IP MAC binding, port redirection and a DMZ host. The firewall includes all of the usual features - an IP filter, SPI, DoS etc. It also has a URL and a Web content filter and IM and P2P filter. The entire firewall is made easier to manage by the use of "objects", essentially profiles, that can be configured and used more than once. You can set up an email address that will be notified if there are any problems with the firewall.

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