DrayTek Vigor 2830n review

The DrayTek Vigor 2830n has the air of a wireless router that means business. With its curved white box, three aerials and all its ports on the front of the unit for easy access, it looks every bit the professional model. Once you begin using it, you realise this air of professionalism isn’t just limited to the Vigor’s appearance.

In fact, the sheer number of features underlines what a superb device this is. Firstly dual-band wireless enables you to use both 2.4GHz and 5GHz when necessary, and it’s even possible to link the Vigor to an ADSL broadband connection and your school network simultaneously. In a school with a lot of pupils trying to access the internet at the same time, this could prove an excellent way of sharing out the load.

DrayTek goes one step further still: plug a 3G mobile broadband dongle into the USB port and you can have a third wireless network working simultaneously, or available in the event of both other networks failing. The router’s USB port can also act as a print server, although this proved tricky to set up and get to work reliably.

Schools will also like the Vigor’s security features. A built-in firewall, WPA2 protection and MAC address filtering are all standard, but more interestingly for schools the Vigor offers content filtering. There are the usual whitelist and blacklist features, which both worked effectively, but it’s even possible to stop learners from visiting social-networking sites, for instance, during school hours. If visitors sometimes use your wireless network, you can also grant them temporary access to the internet (again, with content filtering if you wish) and keep them hidden away from the school network.

In use, the Vigor had no trouble with high numbers of concurrent users (up to 32 are supported), allowing all to have trouble-free internet browsing. In most of our tests it achieved speeds of around 60Mbits/sec, and this was coupled with an excellent range which saw very little speed drop off around the whole school.

The Vigor 2830n isn’t cheap, but if you need reliable and fast wireless access coupled with excellent security features in your school, then we can’t recommend it highly enough.

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