The latest incarnation of the flagship router from Draytek provides good functionality at a good price. Specifically the ability to directly link to a Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) or vhdsl connection without the BT Openreach modem is a useful feature to give better visibility as the quality and speed of the connection. However there are two items that you should ensure are in place before installing on of these routers.
1) make sure that the router has the latest firmware (at time of writing 3.6.2) – this specifically relates to BT FTTC
2) the settings for Wan 1 (general settings) need to have it enabled – also a display name is needed and vlan tag insertion (VDSL) should be enabled and have a tag value of 101 (for UK).
The release notes
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Release Notes for Vigor2850 series
Firmware Version : 3.6.2 (Formal Release) Release Date : 15th June 2012 Build Date : 4th May 2012 Applicable Models : Vigor2850, Vigor2850n, Vigor2850Vn ADSL Modem Code : 2471201 Locale : UK Only / Annex A Only
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[New Features]
1. Support ISDN backup.
2. Support Smart Bandwidth Limit.
3. Support Port Triggering.
4. Support DSCP Re-tag according to QoS class.
[Improvement]
1. Improved: Change VDSL firmware version to 1412f0 – Improves compatibility with BT FTTC
2. Improved: Show status on VPN profile.