Draytek Vigor 2820n review

Draytek's entry to this Labs has to be the most eye-catching router we've ever seen. It's bright white and nearly a foot wide, with a top panel that's all swooping curves. And that's not to mention the three enormous bi-pole aerials at the rear and a front panel littered with bright green blinking status lights.

Unusually, the ports are all arranged along the front, adding to the Vigor's rather menacing look, and there are quite a few of them, too. As well as the usual DSL connection, the Draytek has a single Gigabit Ethernet port, three 10/100 Ethernet ports and a WAN port too, enabling the router to be used with either cable or ADSL internet connections, which is handy if you like hedging your bets.

There's even a USB port on the front, which allows you to plug in a printer for networking or a 3G modem in case your broadband connection goes down. And elsewhere, the feature set is just as impressive, with extensive inbound and outbound traffic filters that include a raft of preset profiles covering everything from P2P and IM applications to Java applets and ActiveX controls.

There's extensive URL and keyword filtering, each with support for both white- and blacklists, and a host of wireless access controls, too. With this router you can set up four different SSIDs, for example, with different levels of security on each one, and there are plenty of logging and bandwidth analysis tools available. It's clear that this router is aimed primarily at small businesses looking to share an internet connection between ten or more users.

It's a shame, given all this, that performance isn't very impressive. In fact the Draytek was the slowest of all the routers on test by a considerable margin, with an overall adjusted rate of just 17.4Mb/sec. And its performance varied wildly - we tried (and failed) to achieve steady file transfer rates, and monitoring the tests with Net Meter revealed rates that went up and down like a yo-yo.

Overall, this means we can't wholly recommend the Draytek. Yes, it does have a more impressive feature set than any other router on test, and the £147 price is softened by the presence of a USB 802.11n adapter in the box. But its performance is significantly below the standard we'd expect, and this puts it well and truly out of the running.

Author: Jonathan Bray