Hi,

I've been using a Vigor 2600 for the past few years and have been more than happy with its performance. However, times change and an upgrade is now being sought.

I have in mind the Vigor 2820. However I have a question about Load Balancing that Google seems unable to find an answer to. Hopefully somebody here can explain in idiot-proof terms...

The company I work for has 3 sites all linked via VPN. The VPN is established using the Vigor2600's at each site. The VPN is used by the branch offices to view files stored on the server at the head office. Our ultimate aim is to improve the speed of the connection between our HO and branch offices without incurring the cost involved in leased lines or SDSL. If I were to go the route of the 2820, have an additional ADSL line installed at the HO and make use of the Load Balancing feature, would this improve the upload speed from our head office to the branch offices?

Cheers in advance

Dan

Neither the 2820 or the older routers do load balancing but someone did point out a great method for VPN failover on routers that do dual WAN but dont support VPN failover - simply set the link as a Dial-Out on the dual WAN router and on the single WAN router, have that set as the dial-in side, that way if the internet connections fails on the head office / dual WAN router, it'll re-establish the connections using the left-over WAN connection

That won't give you any better upload though - if you want to look at doing VPN load balancing to increase upload speeds past what a single WAN connection can achieve, you'll need to look to the routers that actually support that, with those being the 2930, 2955 and 3300.

Thanks for taking the time to reply

I'm aware my current 2600's don't do load-balancing, but according to Mr Draytek's website here http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor2820.html the secondary interface can be used either for WAN-Backup or load balancing :? Maybe the load-balancing isn't supported on the VPN side of things only?

Thanks for the pointers, I'll have a look at the specs and prices.

Dan

The 2820 does do Load Balancing based on set rules relating to internal or external IP or ports.

The 2820 does not do Bonding which I think is what you are referring to in attempting to increase your upload speed.

If setup corrently HQ could have two ADSL lines with Branch Office 1 connecting on ADSL1 (WAN1) and Branch Office 2 connecting on ADSL2 (WAN2).

If everything is based in HQ have you considered using something like Windows Terminal Services?

Ok, thanks for the clarification and the suggestion of connecting each depot on its own line.

Having done a bit more reading I think maybe Voodle was saying that the 2820 doesn't do VPN trunking, whereas the 2930 and 2955 do.

Terminal services would be nice, but unfortunately the outlay cannot be justified to the chequebook keepers!

increasing employee productivity with faster opening files must be understandable to any bean-counter.

A 2950 is hardly going to break the bank. Further, I noticed the other day Spitfire doing a 1MB SDSL service for £99 a month - or only £109 for SDSL and redundant ADSL.

Can you get better upload speeds using Be* Annex M double upload ADSL2+ ?

Regards,

Neal