Product Reviews

If you want to share your ADSL broadband connection between a number of computers, but don't want wires cluttering up your home or office, you need a wireless ADSL router. This is a device that you can plug your ADSL line straight into and that will automatically channel your Internet connection to each of the PCs in your wireless network.

Our current recommended wireless router is the KCorp Wireless Gold. The KCorp costs eighty pounds and completed our long-range file transfer test in just 55 seconds. It doesn't, however, have a built-in ADSL capability. The advantage of this is that you can use it if you have another type of broadband connection - cable, for instance. The disadvantage is that you have to buy an Ethernet-compatible ADSL or cable modem, at a cost of about forty pounds.

Draytek's Vigor 2600VG is an ADSL router with wireless technology

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built in. You get everything in one box. Setup is incredibly easy: you just plug the ADSL phone line into the Vigor, open its Web configuration page and tell it to autodetect your ADSL settings. Once it's done that, just enter the username and password given by your ISP, and you're off.

Ease of use was a recurring theme with this product. We used it to set up several 'virtual private networks' (VPNs) - secure connections made over the Internet between the router and a PC in a remote location. The purpose of VPNs is to allow a remote PC (or PCs, as the Vigor supports up to 16 incoming VPN connections) to securely browse your PC or network over the Internet, without putting your network at risk from hackers. This is useful if the router is at your office, and you want to work from home sometimes.

The Vigor's simple Web-style controls make it easy to set up a VPN, and we were soon browsing our network from a location 10 miles away from our PC. The 2600VG also supports Voiceover-IP (VoIP), either by dialling the IP addresses of other VoIP users or by signing up to a VoIP service provider. The Vigor is also fast. It completed our long-range file transfer test in just 59 seconds: one of the best times we've seen.

If you're a home user and you just want wireless broadband, the Draytek is too pricey. However, the advanced features, ease of setup and top performance will save small businesses time and money.

KARL WRIGHT