DrayTek Vigor 2860ac

A SMALL BUSINESS ROUTER FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT ADVANCED MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY. NOT FOR THE BEGINNER, HOWEVER.

DRAYTEK ROUTERS ARE o en preferred by people who want a bit more from their router than the typical consumer, and aren’t afraid of facing some tough technical terms and choices. ey’re very much designed for small businesses and ‘prosumers’ — if you’re looking for an easy setup or aren’t interested in the advanced management and security features on o er, then you’re probably better o with an easier solution. But if you’re willing to pay top dollar for a router with enterprise features, the DrayTek is a good option.

e DrayTek Vigor has a unique ports-forward design reminiscent of rack-mount routers, designed for easy patch-plugging of devices. ere are six LAN ports as well, in addition to the WAN port and ADSL port.

e rmware supports VPNs — both client and server — and DrayTek has nally cleaned up its VPN con guration, although there are still some annoyances like the VPN wizard not supporting SSL. It also supports multiple-device management from a single console (if you have multiple DrayTek routers in play); load balancing and failover between WAN options, which can include 3G/4G modem plugged into it USB ports; VLAN segmentation; business-grade content ltering; per-user scheduling and reporting, advanced QoS and more.

If everything in that last paragraph sounds like gibberish to you, then this probably isn’t what you want. DrayTek is not big on the handholding and even its mobile apps are pretty raw. But if you feel comfortable with those things, then DrayTek o ers quite a bit more than your typical router. It doesn’t have cutting-edge hardware, but it does have a lot going on under the hood.