Went mental and bought stupidly expensive Draytek router...

[dangel]

I'm so fed up with cr@ppy linkysys and netgear el cheapo routers that i decided to push the boat up and spend 150quid on:

Draytek Vigor 2800VG




Am I mad? Is it overkill? Is it even all that great?

Wife is giving me the evils about the price..

[blueball]

Don't know about the 2800VG but I have used a Vigor 2900 for a couple of years and I haven't had to touch it since installation/config - rock solid and just plain does it's job!

[DanceswithUnix]

I have the 2600G on a noisey phone line, and it doesn't seem to cope quite as well as the cheap thing I had before despite upgrading to a special noisey line firmware. I use the excellent VPN functions of it though.

[dangel]

I've very close to my exchange so i should be good - sounds like I made a good choice and I do want to make use of some of the more advanced features

I'm getting tempted to try ADSLMAX but ukonline doesn't support it as yet (and they have no usage limits) now i'm getting a decent router.

[Chunkers]

I had a Draytek 2600We for years until it was smoke damaged in February. I made the mistake of replacing it with a Netgear 834G router based on a recommendation, there is no comparison in terms of reliability / uptime and features / flexibility - it is very likely I will be buying another Draytek and binning the Netgear shortly.

Good decision, no point on skimping on the fundamentals - a quality connection and network, for most of us a reliable, flexible link is a basic requirement.

It always amazes me that people will spend £100s on fancy graphics card and PC equipment and then get the cheapest / crappiest NIC and router they can find to connect to the web, especially with ADSLMax where your connection speed is variable dependant on SNR etc

Nice one

Chunks

[dangel]

Cheers for that Chunkers - that's pretty much my thoughts. I've had 3 netgears now (all of which progressively die or won't synch unless you peform weird rebooting rituals) and a linksys which doesn't even support pppoe which is useless. I'd also like to actually see upnp work for a change - it's a great idea and i'm not a fan of manually configuring NAT when i'm trying to get something else done.

I got myself a quality splitter at the same time so hopefully overall it'll be a big improvement over my current situation and give me the confidence to try ADSLMAX.

[Zak33]

Vigor's are amazing, but they're also quite...performance orientated, so their are new firmwares to install for some issues, and there are lots of command lines yo ucan run on a telnet prompt, so do things such as limit the connection speed to help stabilise a connection.

But one of the coolest (apart from the VPN functions which are mammothly better and faster than Netget, and Idon't know why, they just are in real life) is PORT THROTTLING

You can limit the download and upload speed of each of the 4 network ports, so that all the PC's get a fair share.

BUT....NOTE: ALWAYS use Internet explorer tochange the functions NEVER FIREFOX, as they won't work ...and if you DO port throttle, remember it ALSO throttle the speed between PC's so transfering files took me 10million times longer until I realised why!

[dangel]

Cool top tips - cheers!

I'm probably going to use it to prioritise surfing versus bittorrent for example but i don't need to manage it per pc, just per protocol (which, I suppose, is per port).

[Funkstar]

is the port throttling for physical ports or TCP/IP ports?

[Zak33]

physical...its the actual RJ45 plug hole! 1 to 4 .....choose and put numbers in

[Zak33]

here....


in this example, I've capped socket 1 and socket 2 to 128 upload and 512 download, so neither can hog all the bandwidth, but left 3 and 4 unthrottled, so they can do what they want.

Lots of potential combos. it's excellent

[Zak33]

moved by Moi as its a networking thang!

[DR]

I have an Ovislink thing - which is very similar, same CPU

Rocks =)

[FatalSaviour]

I'm so fed up with cr@ppy linkysys and netgear el cheapo routers that i decided to push the boat up and spend 150quid on:

Draytek Vigor 2800VG

Am I mad? Is it overkill? Is it even all that great?

Wife is giving me the evils about the price..

Some backup for you vs the wife dangel...

GOOD CHOICE...IN FACT, EXCELLENT CHOICE...COULDN'T HAVE DONE BETTER MYSELF!!!!

Now that's over with...I bought a 2800VG last week...I've been very impressed with it on the whole...having a few issues with updating the firmware atm...but other than that niggle, it's been rock solid, the VPN is 10x better than the old router that managed it, and whether it's just me, but it seems a lot faster at doing everything...browsing the web, and transferring files across the network...strange, but it certainly seems that way

[jon bda]

Bought myself a 2800G the other week...had a few probs getting it running tidy but now it is its excellent...well worth the cash!.

[Trash Man]

Don't know about the 2800VG but I have used a Vigor 2900 for a couple of years and I haven't had to touch it since installation/config - rock solid and just plain does it's job!

I can say the same thing about my router I paid £25 2 years ago