A few months ago my ISP (Timico) sent out a mailshot saying that they were going to be moving people onto 21CN circuits in the near future, but to please contact them straight away if you were using a DrayTek router due to incompabilities.

It turns out that they weren't worried about the newer series as they work just fine (I've got the 2820Vn and it does indeed work perfectly on 21CN), but the older 2600 range cause problems/instability when on a 21CN circuit and as such they weren't switching over anyone who said that they had one of these.

Like the above said I'm afraid you probably need to get some new kit or get your ISP to switch you back to a non 21CN circuit!

Are we talking about ye olde 2600 here or the 2600 plus ?

Dunno.. i was talking about ye old 2600 , no pluses or anything.

jhurrell wrote: I totally understand that you don't want to shell out for new kit when you didn't ask for any change to your service, but the bottom line is that the 2600 is not ADSL2+ compatible (it never stated that it was in its specs). I guess if you're happy with the capped 8M speed and the frequent disconnects then so be it...

You're mostly right of course and I can't really argue with it Despite not exactly being overjoyed at the prospect of buying new kit I can't afford to replace kit that should work just to support an upgrade I don't want, I would if money were no object. It's well past it's prime given age and power-on hours so pretty likely to give up permanently anytime soon. I most likely would have replaced it already IF I thought it would actually fix the problem I'm seeing but I'm in no way convinced that it will. If the other end is randomly stalling for periods of 1 - several minutes at a time due to a bug (or whatever) as I suspect then no change of router is likely to fix that. The best that will happen is a different router will simply ignore the situation for longer leaving an up to several minute break in service that it doesn't report or attempt to do anything about ! Other customers, no doubt using various other routers, appear to be reporting that kinda issue amongst others things. I'm pretty much convinced that the fundamental problem is quite real but the effect it has on a particular customer is somewhat dependent on the equipment they're using and also whether they're looking at what's going on or noticing, particularly so at the stupid hours of the day when I'm often online. That's partly why I'm interested in trying to tweak the timeouts - my money is on the problem still being there but it will simply be ignored and everything will carry on as normal after the break.

As for speed, I have no real use for 8MB let alone >8Mb theoretical data rate and esp so when there's contention, traffic management, congestion, throttling and 1001 other things that reduce Real World speed for general use to significantly less anyway. My service before the unwanted upgrade was in fact just 2MB not even a MAXed line and if I hadn't actually noticed the change in line synch then I probably wouldn't have really noticed the difference at all when I suddenly had a 4x faster connection !

The 2600 obviously isn't ADSL2 compatible ... but ADSL2 and the relevant exchange equipment claims to be ASDL1 compatible of course. Fundamentally it must be if it negotiates G.DMT in the first place. If there's any fault at all with the 2600 then it's a design error or bug (IMHO) which means that it doesn't do the equivalent of a hard reset if/when the other end terminates or things get a tad silly at any time. Restarting from the beginning rather than partway through a state machine sequence is always going to be a good idea if there's any 1 significant error or a significant number of minor errors or other issues.

guyver wrote: A few months ago my ISP (Timico) sent out a mailshot saying that they were going to be moving people onto 21CN circuits in the near future, but to please contact them straight away if you were using a DrayTek router due to incompabilities.

It turns out that they weren't worried about the newer series as they work just fine (I've got the 2820Vn and it does indeed work perfectly on 21CN), but the older 2600 range cause problems/instability when on a 21CN circuit and as such they weren't switching over anyone who said that they had one of these.

Like the above said I'm afraid you probably need to get some new kit or get your ISP to switch you back to a non 21CN circuit!

That very interesting, many thanks I wonder if they'll talk to me (as a non customer) and explain what they believe the problem is just out of morbid curiosity ? I rather suspect that any "incompatibility" is primarily that the Vigor expects things to be exactly as they should be and complains and/or tries to take some action about it if/when they're not :lol: There may well be issues with Vigor stuff that I'm not aware of because I'm not seeing it of course but what I am seeing suggests that it's the other end equipment that is incompatible with the Vigor mostly because it's non-compliant to the spec. The Vigor is just being rather more than a tad over-enthusiastic, both in it's demands on the equipment at the other end and also by the action it takes when it's not happy with what's going on - or NOT going on as the case may be ! What I personally think is design error (or bug) I mentioned in an earlier post obviously doesn't help.

I'm quite certain that I'm going to have to submit and spend money eventually but I'm not going down without a fight. I seriously object to forced upgrades of anything on a good day but especially so forced upgrades that cost me money just so that someone else can save money. There is no good reason I can see why it shouldn't work and it should work well just like it always has done. The issue does not appear to be one of transmission problems, noise, signal quality or anything like that it's not really a line issue at all it's a networking issue plus the fact that it perhaps expects a bit too much from the equipment at the other end. Any old ADSL2+ router configured or falling back to use G.DMT is, in principle, identical to the 2600 except for any monitoring and definitions of what constitutes a fault and so on of course.

What's the consensus of opinion for a replacement ? I don't need wireless, I do need a firewall, ideally a switch and most certainly full logging via syslog. In fact I literally just need a replacement that is in virtually all respects form/fit/function compatible with the 2600 except for ADSL2+ capability. I don't really need any extra bells and whistles just something that does exactly what it says on the tin, does it well and doesn't give me grief.