Best dual/triple WAN router?

mcquaim

Hi there,

My friend needs to buy a new router to handle ADSL and Cable (via Net1 wireless crap). I was thinking they could get a Draytek Vigor 2860AC as it supports G vectoring when fibre becomes available in their area but after reading reviews it looks like WiFi signal strength isn't great on this model.

I used have the Vigor 2850Vn model and I thought it was great.

Anyone know any other good dual WAN routers?

Cheers,
mcquaim

ED E

Drayteks or Mikrotiks are the two to look at. Really they verge on the professional market where wifi is dealt with by APs and routing is just routing, so you wont see a Draytek with 12x antennas like the new DLinks.

mcquaim

ED E wrote: »

Drayteks or Mikrotiks are the two to look at. Really they verge on the professional market where wifi is dealt with by APs and routing is just routing, so you wont see a Draytek with 12x antennas like the new DLinks.

Cheers ED E!

Are there any of the routers aimed for the home market that support ADSL/VDSL and Cable broadband?

I can't see any of them that do..

The Draytek is about €400 so quite steep if the WiFi isn't going to cover their whole house...

ED E

Bear in mind, irish homes often use brick/stone internal walls and no one device can ever get full coverage in some homes, the transmission power limit prevents that.


Would you consider an ADSL Modem and then use a dual eth WAN router? That would give you more choices and should they provide VDSL then you can use the ISP gateway as a modem in its place.

mcquaim

ED E wrote: »

Bear in mind, irish homes often use brick/stone internal walls and no one device can ever get full coverage in some homes, the transmission power limit prevents that.


Would you consider an ADSL Modem and then use a dual eth WAN router? That would give you more choices and should they provide VDSL then you can use the ISP gateway as a modem in its place.

Yeah, a dual WAN router would work possibly either!

What brands would you suggest to look at?

Only concern is powering two devices instead of just the one and two points of failure instead of one..

65535

http://en.avm.de/products/

Fritz Boxes

mcquaim

65535 wrote: »

http://en.avm.de/products/

Fritz Boxes

Cheers but none of those have dual wan, either adsl/vdsl or cable but not both together unless I'm missing something?

65535

mcquaim wrote: »

Cheers but none of those have dual wan, either adsl/vdsl or cable but not both together unless I'm missing something?

Yes, I think you are correct there.
Not dual Cable and DSL

ED E

This.


You may spend more if you want more features. Its only FE, so if you have a combined bandwidth above 95Mb it will start to throttle things, but for the current use case it would be perfect. I'd get it and an 8Port GigE Switch, plonk the modem on top and away you go.

mcquaim

I ended up buying a Draytek Vigor 2860ac for my mate and myself but only got around to set it up for myself so far!

I'm not impressed so far, download/upload speeds way down from what I was getting on my Netgear D6400.

I'm about 20Mbps slower on download and 6Mbps slower on upload.

I've been onto the support with my ISP and Draytek and all my settings seem correct.

Does anyone else have this router set up and how do you find it?

I doubt they could be going back...

Cheers,
mcquaim

ED E

From what speeds to what speeds?

Spitballing:
A. Falling back from VDSL to ADSL?
B. G.Vectoring not activating(-30% performance), firmware up to date?

mcquaim

Thanks for the post!

It's not falling back to ADSL as the speeds as still too high, around 66Mbps. I was getting around 86Mbps on my Netgear D6400 so a big drop off..

I was suspecting some issue with vectoring myself! The Draytek support guy was supposed to remotely log onto the router today to check but he seems to have gone AWOL on me, not a peep today..

I'm on the latest firmware 3.8.2 (Vector 2) and the Draytek guy says this should work fine in Ireland.

Perhaps I need to try and older firmware but I was hoping someone here would be using the 2860 and could let me know how it's going for them..

ED E

From Amazon:

Stay clear if you need a stable, bug-free router, 2 Aug. 2014
By Toby the Tenor
This review is from: DrayTek Vigor 2860N VDSL/ADSL Router Firewall with Wireless N & 6 Gigabit Ports & 3G (Personal Computers)
Time for an less than ideal review!

I bought one of these in December 2013, mainly because it supports various site-to-site VPN set-up (dial-in also), has an Ethernet WAN port and an impressive VPN throughput speed compared to similarly powerful devices from Cisco or Juniper.

I had previously worked with a 2830, and know Drayteks generally to be of great stability and build quality.

Two official firmware version are currently available from Draytek.

Version 3.7.3.3 unfortuantely breaks access to some site using SSL, including the all important Google Mail and Google Drive. In addition, 3.7.3.3 sees an issue where a dial-in IPSec VPN connection will drop every three minutes or so.
Furthermore, I hear that VDSL authentication is buggy.

Version 3.7.4.1 has two problems of its own on the other hand:
- When UPnP is enabled, and ADSL connection will drop every few minutes.
- WiFi access breaks for about 30 seconds every few minutes (it stays connected, but no traffic is going through).

Version 3.7.4.1 was released in April, and since Draytek support have emailed me (and others) several 'beta' versions of firmware that is trying to address those problems.
Some of those firmwares come with their own problems, and have the ability to brick the router. This is unpleasant, as the restore tool Draytek provides only works on Windows XP (and alternative methods don't seem to work at all for this one).

I was sent the latest beta version mid July, and while now all the VPN, UPnP and WiFi issues have been addressed, the SNR can no longer be adjusted on this one.

It would be a great device, but for anybody requiring a stable production router, I recommend looking elsewhere, until all the firmware bugs have been addressed.
I've reverted to mainly using my old router now, and plug in the Draytek only when I'm bored and try to find some more bugs.

Update February 2015: I have switched to FTTC now with firmware 3.7.8
My DSLAM chipset vendor (i.e. the equipment in the street cabinet) is reported as 'IFTN' (Infineon Technologies, which is now the Israeli company ECI).
With this combination, NEITHER of the 3.7.8 VECTOR firmwares work, in that I experienced frequent disconnections (about every 30min) with all four combinations of VECTOR firmware and modem code.
The 3.7.8 STD firmware is stable, although I had to turn SRA off via telnet (vdsl optn sra US = 1, vdsl optn sra DS = 1).

However, I am pleased to say that issues with UPnP, WiFi and VPN have now been fixed, upgrading to three star rating.
The one thing that makes me stick with Draytek is the l2l VPN throughput, much better than any comparable product of this price that I know (though I haven't tried the new Zyxel series yet).

Another problem(?) that has come to light is however that the maximum number of DHCP leases is limited to 256.
For most people, this won't be an issue. This came to light for use in a conferencing venue. The router was configured for a Class A network with a /16 subnet, which offers ~ 65000 available addresses. The 2860 can only assign 256 of those.

Sounds like there might be an issue, but BT Openreach use a selection of cabs where eir are all Huawei.

I'd keep chasing Draytek, because it *should* work.