Vigor2820 – One Class Above Vigor2800

A Detailed Comparison

DrayTek Australia has recently phased out the Vigor2800 series and replaced it with the Vigor2820 series. Many of IT specialists who bought Vigor2800 and supply them to their business/home customers would be pleased to know that Vigor2820 series has many improvements over the Vigor2800 series. This paper discusses these differences in details.

1. WAN Interfaces
   
   Vigor2820 series is called a 「Universal Router」 because it has 2 WAN ports, the first an ADSL2/2+ port, and the second can take on any of the possible interfaces for Internet on earth: ADSL2/2+, Cable, Satellite, ISDN (not used in Australia/NZ), 3G mobile broadband – this makes it unique in the market.
   
   
   The diversified Internet accesses mean that the users will not need to suffer Internet outages when a WAN failure occurs. The 2 WANs can work in 1 of 3 modes:
   
   
   • Failover mode - when the primary WAN connection fails, the other, which can be ADSL2/2+, Cable, Satellite, or 3G mobile, will take over in seconds. When the primary WAN returns, it takes over again automatically.
   • Load Balance mode - 2 WAN interfaces share the work load.
   • Bandwidth on Demand mode - the user can define a traffic threshold for the second WAN to become active and then drop off when the traffic goes below the set threshold.
   
   The users can also start with only one WAN interface and grow to the second at any time in the future.
   
   Below is a screen shot of the WAN setup page for Vigor2820/n/Vn:
   
   
   
   
2. LAN Interface
   One of the 4 LAN ports is 1000Mbps allowing a high speed connection for a network server or section of the LAN where higher traffic volumes are required.
   
   Other powerful LAN functions and features are similar for the 2 series of routers.
   
   
3. USB Interface
   The USB port for Vigor2800 has USB 1.1 standard whereas Vigor2820 has USB 2.0 standard allowing faster data transfer (480 Mbps vs. 12 Mbps). Besides, the new USB port in Vigor2820 supports 3G interface and USB File Sharing devices such as flash disk/hard disk, etc., in addition to printer server.
   
   
4. Firewall
   Vigor2800 has Rule Based firewall whereas Vigor2820 has Object Based firewall. This makes it a lot easier to setup and maintain firewall rules for all kinds of scenarios. For example, in Vigor2800 it's impossible to block IM/P2P on specified users, but now in Vigor2820, IM/P2P blocking can be set for specified IP addresses. An importance addition to Vigor2820 is the Advanced CSM capability providing easy settings to block more recent applications, such as SoftEther, VNN, etc., that threaten the network security due to the use of tunneling, streaming or remote access/control techniques. Below is a comparison of the Firewall setting pages of Vigor2800 and Vigor2820. As can be seen, Firewall for Vigor2820 is a lot more comprehensive.
   
   
   
   
5. VoIP
   Due to the increasing popularity of VoIP in the businesses, Vigor2820 supports up to 12 SIP registrars instead of 6 for Vigor2800. Previous powerful VoIP features of Vigor2800 series, including Digit Map, PBX functions, etc. are maintained.
   
   
6. VPN
   VPN has been the strongest selling point for DrayTek products, and Vigor2820 series contains all of the powerful VPN protocols with additional NETBIOS broadcast blocking. This allows network administrators to block VPN packets to be sent to remote VPN sites. While this feature was originally designed to show the list of local station remotely in Window's Network Neighborhood, it uses up bandwidth unnecessarily and has become a security threat.
   
   
7. WLAN
   WLAN is another big improvement of Vigor2820 over Vigor2800. Not only that the WLAN standard is IEEE 802.11n instead of 802.11g with the maximum data transmission rate increased from 54 Mbps/108 Mbps to 300 Mbps, there are also improvements on the signal strength and reliability with the new MIMO technology. Customers will notice that there are 3 antennas instead of 2 for the Vigor2820, but this is just the start. More improvements are on the firmware side, including:
   
   
   • WPA2 instead of WPA – more secure WLAN connections.
   • 4 SSIDs instead of 1 SSID – easier for user grouping, each with its own rate and access control. It's like having 4 APs instead of 1.
   • WMM – WLAN Multi-Media functions.
   • WPS – setting up a WLAN link becomes quite easy even for non-technical people.
     
   
   The screen shots below show the setting options and the Rate Control page for each SSID.
   
   
   
   
8. Network Management
   Vigor2820 has advanced SSH secured command line interface, so the commands are encrypted for better network security.
   
   Vigor2820 has TR-069 protocol built-in allowing centralized management for auto-configuration, scheduled firmware upgrades, etc.
   
   All other network management tools of Vigor2800 are also contained.