Three have recently upgraded the network in my area to DC-HSDPA but before buying a new DC-HSDPA capable dongle I wondered if anyone could tell me a) Does the 2820VN (Latest publicly available FW installed) support the Huawei E3256 dongle? and b) will the 2820VN work properly with DC-HSDPA?

I've seen posts in relation to another router which suggested that DC-HSDPA would only work where device specific drivers were available on the router?.

Many thanks.

I went ahead and got a Huawei E3256 on 3. Initially I installed tried it plugged directly into my laptop and sure enough my downstream speed almost doubled when compared to my Huawei E367 (Non DC-HSDPA).

I then plugged the E3256 into my vigor 2820VN and am pleased to report that it was detected and a connection established. After performing some more speed tests it appears that when plugged into the Vigor I still only get HSDPA speeds and not DC-HSDPA speeds (ie. half what I get when plugging the dongle directly into the computer). Another observation is that on the Vigor's "Online Status" page the E3256's mode (ie WAN2 mode) was predominantly showing "0" but ocassionally would show "4220000" (or something similar to that).

I wasn't really expecting the dongle to work at all so I'm very pleased that it does, It would be great to see full DC-HSDPA support added for the modem and I'll get the modem data over to Draytek but appreciated this router is now a few years old.

What sort of speeds were you seeing it max out at? That's great that it worked

I suspect that that kind of speed would max out the router's chipset / USB port though if it's anything like the NAS support.