Hello guys , I'm new here but having had a day of frustration at the hands of 2 draytek 2820vn routers I feel must post.

Let me first clue you in. One of my clients has an old linksys router tied to a netgear firewall, the router (in bridge mode) died and so they asked me to suggest a replacement with a bit of fallover protection, the 2820 looked ideal so i got them to order one

( they actually ordered 2 by mistake but this turned out to be somewhat helpful)

and headed up there today to fit it. all goes fairly smoothly, network came up, got the ports forwarded for the trixbox pbx and it seemed to be working.

then I started to configure the vpn, during the process I did a soft reboot and "poof" the unit dies , just flicks on and off act light flashes and nothing.

so I thought ok , better try again with no2, get that connected to the internet smoothly, but then no end of port forwarding issues, the damm trixbox wont register properly, all with the same settings as the first (this is not rocket science)

I ended up giving up and dug out an old router that I configured as a bridge and hooked this to the netgear firewall and all was working fine.

I'm now left wondering why on earth did I bother with the draytek, I've read through the forums and the firmware seems to have many problems that you just don't see in budget routers,

guys please give me some hope here or some honest feedback, so i can decide what to do with these routers,

right now I think they can go back and I'll get a Asus RT-N16 and stick dd-wrt on it.

I have seen some problems with firmwares on a earlier 2800 but then with a later firmware I saw thousands of hours uptime, so many in fact it was a serious local power cut that stopped me recording it. IMHO find a sorted firmware and the Vigors offer brilliant value and capabilities.

Did you try later firmware on one?

I've a 2820n here that has been reliable for as long as I ran it (its still running but only as WIFI/backup) but I needed SSL vpn so added a 2955 again the only real problem I have seen is trying to "word filter" on "Itunes" while many connections already made, constant reboot cycle till I turned that off again.
Just upgraded the firmware and may try again (that was first firmware released and stable otherwise)

It may be that with 1000 options there are more chances of problems than a router of the same cost with 500 but that's not to say they are unreliable just if you don't want/need the feature set go with something more basic and on its fifth version.
In networking I always think "a house with seven doors is harder to secure than one with two".

Maybe we should have a real world uptime thread where people can post reliability experience. Over-all mine with Vigor has been about 99.9% good the only router that has been more reliable offers about 30% of the features for 80% of the cost and comes from one of the biggest names and has been available (tested) for at least four years, not really a surprise.

I'd give it another go, maybe update firmware flush some IP/MAC tables locally on other kit, ensure nothing about the "V" suffix is tying up ports you need to use.

I'd stick with it.. I've used one in front of some very busy webcams and it has worked OK.

I've had problems of some sort with just about every DSL router I've used in the last ~10years: SARs, ASUS, Billion and the Draytek. Hopefully the next f/w upgrade will improve things.

The manufacturers life is made easier by forums such as this with people willing to share their problems (!) - if only they would USE that to their advantage, think what a great product they would have!
[Think how much VV&T resource that saves them ;-) ]

It occurs to me that it don't matter how much you spend: we've got some seriously expensive Juniper router kit here; we're going to 'try' the latest f/w for those to see IF it fixes the 'unexpected failure / filesystem corruption' bug.... no guarantees, mind!

Would the Vigor 120 have been a good "get them going" option?

Then for redundancy... a spare Vigor 120?!? Or perhaps change the firewall?

Hello Guys, Thanks for the replies

Yes I did try the latest firmware on the second one but had problems with the VoIP registrations, and it appears looking at the forum I'm not alone and there is a fault with the firmware. (http://www.forum.draytek.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=14507)

I could wait for this to be updated but I cant say that I'm happy to do this, especially with 1 of the 2 units failing in the first few hours of use.

@nealuk, Yes The Vigor 120 would be ideal as a modem attached to the current netgear firewall but the netgear only has 1 wan port so yes I would need to change this for the redundancy we require, hence the 2820.

Thanks for your replies guys.. I'll think on it some more.

Is the problem that you used a VoIP routeR (one with its own VoIP facility) but you were trying to set up a similar system behind it, so the router would intercept the packets as it woudl assume they were for itself...