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DrayTek Vigor 2600VGi - Broadband router with VoIP functions and optionally WiFi support. | ||
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DrayTek is one of the few router manufacturers, that has picked up the idea, that the router should actually be the central point of communication in the house. And even though
you might be forced to buy a ISDN or PSTN line when ordering ADSL, VoIP is still interesting for a lot of reasons. The DrayTek 2600 series router come with various of options, but essentially in them is the build in ADSL modem, a 4 port switch and the USB port that acts as standard LPD printserver and last but not least 2 FXS (POTS) ports for regular PSTN phones, to be used for VoIP. Now, as addon's you can get ISDN backup, to be used in case that your ADSL line dies, and wireless access point capability. I went for a model with all inclusive and due to the fact that i can not get ADSL after I moved, the ISDN option came in quite handy. | |
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If you look at the back of this unit, you have from left to right the usb port for a printer to be attached, power, power switch, 2 VoIP ports, a 4 ports 10/100 switch, the ADSL modem port and the port for the ISDN line that is used for backup, in case that the ADSL line fails or you simply don't have ADSL and want to use this router as a ISDN router. Let's start in that order: The USB port is for connecting a printer and it could not be simpler, attach the printer, eventually reboot the router to let it detect the printer and go. The DrayTek router provides a regular LPD server that easily can be used from Linux and Windows boxes. Driver handling is done on the client machine, so the DrayTek doesn't have to bother about it. The VoIP bit is the most interesting bit of this fella. The router supports SIP and G.723, G.726-32, G.729(a/b), G.711 alaw and ulaw codecs. DTMF is supported inband and outband. In recent firmwares the support for SIP INFO has been added. I've seen it the first time in 2.5.5.3, it wasn't introduced in 2.5.2 and 2.5.3 yet. Also the handling of where the SIP server is has been improved in recent firmwares. 2.5.2 had problems, when the SIP server was on the inside interface of the router. In 2.5.5.3 that is not an issue anymore. You can connect to any SIP server, no matter if it is on the inside or outside. One limitation is though still in place: You can not assign the two ports to different providers. There is only one field for the SIP server used for both ports. Also the codec setting is global. Each port however can be assigned to an individual account. The router has a dialplan function, that allows you to predefine up to 60 extensions in the form of phoneno., name and ip/domain. This can be quite handy, if you want to use VoIP functions without necessary going over your VoIP provider. This router also has no problems with having VoIP devices behind it. It doesn't screw in any way with these, making it quite uncomplicated to get them running. The VoIP part of the router is held quite simple, which certainly makes it userfriendly. |
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The menu is structured quite well in general. Sometimes there is an option, where you think: "Why did they now move that there ?", but often it probably is due to, that they took a platform they had and added something completely new in, like VoIP. Anyhow, it is not really hard to find, where which option has to be set and get everything working. The build-in switch supports vlan's and traffic shaping/rate control, which is quite nice. Each individual port can be assigned to a different VLAN and also be limited seperately in upstream and downstream bandwidth. This does unfortunatly not include the WiFi accesspoint, again probably down to, that it actually is an optional add-on on the basic model. Traffic shaping can be done in steps of 32 kbit from 32 kbit to 100 mbit. The standard features like DMZ, DHCP server (for LAN and DMZ), RIP, DNS passthru are of course supported. The router also supports Dynamic DNS features for dyndns.org, NO-IP.COM Free, DtDNS ChangeIP.com, Companity (www.dns4biz.com) and ddns.com.cn. A large amount of features for setting up NAT, DMZ, port-forwarding etc. are provided. One of the features, that makes this router exceptional is that it provides IPSec, PPTP and L2TP client AND server functionality. Dial-In via PPP, if you have the ISDN port, is also possible. You can even require, that a client has to use VPN to be able to connect to the network via WiFi. | |
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The router supports PPPoE and PPPoA, various forms of modulation and even PPPoE passthru, if necessary, which can be limited to wired LAN or WiFi. ISDN backup trigger can be configured as well. The dialup to ADSL or ISDN can be scheduled if you wish to and the ISDN router part supports dual ISP setup. For ISDN PPP/MP of course also is supported either on demand by freely configured thresholds or allways limited to 64k/128k. The ISDN router function also allows dial-in, if necessary and Virtual TA (Remote CAPI), so that clients in the network can use the router as Terminal Adapter, instead of having a terminal adapter installed in every machine. |
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Another quite interesting thing is the WiFi bit of the router. The radio can be limited to be 802.11b only, 802.11g only or both. WEP 64 bit, 128 bit and 802.1x, but also WPA Pre-Shared key and 802.1x are supported, in nearly every combination. On top of that certain MAC addresses can be locked out or only allowed MAC addresses let it and you can specify pr. MAC address, if VPN is required to use WiFi. The radio is very stable and usually gives good coverage. The antenna's are detachable and the router has standard RP-SMA female connectors, so that a omni or directional long range antenna can be used to widen the range or bridge between offices. | |
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Last but not least leaves to mention, that the router also provides a wide range of diagnostic tools. And if those aren't enough, you can allways redirect the debug messages to a syslog server of your choice. Firmware upgrades are transferred via the build-in tftp server and the configuration can be stored or restored via the webinterface from or to a file, locally on your machine or on a server. Covering all aspects of this router would blow this little review completely out of proportions, but i certainly must say, this router is worth the extra money, that it costs in comparison to a lot of cheap routers on the marked. It beats any other router in reliability and feature-set. |
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Created February 1st, 2005 - last updated: June 4th, 2005 | ||
