EDIT/Note: While comments about the 4G/3G handling are accurate there are some issues with the RUT950 that are raised later in the thread. This isn't nirvana, it has strengths and weaknesses.

Having spent more months on this than I care to think about I have finally admitted defeat and re-purposed my 2860Vn+ to my home base VDSL router.

Now that may not sound like a bad thing but the reason I bought this router was because I wanted to make use of the dual USB ports and 3G/4G support. With hindsight, I should have realised I didn't know enough about the options out there or I would have looked for a product dedicated to mobile data support. I didn't, so mea culpa on that at least but to be blunt, the 2860 really should not be classed as suitable are suitable where 3G/4G dongles are providing the primary connectivity.

The key reasons for this are as follow:
1. 3G/4G signals are regularly lost and as a result the router needs to be able to recognise and resolve this reliably.
2. Most dongles need a hard reboot to be able to recover the connection.
3. As per 2. instead of rebooting the router will often sit without a connection and just drop both 3G/4G routes.

On top of that the whole 2860 product has a number of flaws that make me wonder whether the product is actually out of beta. Trying to use the recommended firmware (vector 2) causes huge numbers of problems with reliable connectivity on VDSL while the BT supplier fibre modem takes it all its stride. Flash back to the non-vector version and all the problems are resolved.

All in all I have to say it has been disappointing. Granted I haven't taken most of these issues to support because there seem to be so many. And having had the 2830 prior to this I've been constantly amazed that issues resolved on that model have been reintroduced in the 2860 or nobody thought to parse the fixes across. Take my regular rants about "ping detect" as a classic example.

At the end of the day I simply do not have the time to debug what should be a polished product. This stuff should be part of any testing protocol and resolved properly instead of waiting on some vocal, technically minded individual with time and money to burn doing it for them.


Hmm... seems my post has turned into something of a rant but at the end of the day if anyone else is considering or has just purchased a 2860 (or any other draytek product) where there is a heavy reliance on the 3G or 4G connection rather than ADSL/VDSL, I would strongly recommend you go back to the drawing board and get something like the Teltonika RUT950. It does have its down sides in the sense that documentation tends to parrot what's on the web interface but my RUT950 has proven rock solid and better than any dongle based router solution.

Hope that's of use.

PS: 3000 letter post limit... Oh ain't that just the icing on the cake... *sigh*

Sorry to hear of your experience. It shouldn't have been this way; did you go over this with support ?

admin wrote: Sorry to hear of your experience. It shouldn't have been this way; did you go over this with support ?

To be honest, no... I found myself facing issues that had all been resolved at different times with my earlier 2830 and I simply don't have time to play tech support ping pong. I just did what I could with what I had but there were certainly times I considered switching back to my 2830 as it handled things much more reliably.

That aside, my comments about the RUT950 are proving very accurate for anyone considering a 3G/4G setup as primary connection. The whole thing is rock solid, reboots automatically, fails-over to a secondary sim when there's a disconnect, handles bandwidth limits properly (per SIM) and critically, it reboots when it detects that it's no longer getting any connection.

All of these things make it exactly what we'd needed all along. About the only complaint I have about the RUT950 is that there's not much in the way of documentation that isn't in Polish or something other than English but that's just giving me a taste how the other half live, given how non-English speakers must feel about English only manuals.

The 2860 is doing a reasonable job as a home-office router with VDSL, providing VPN to the RUT950 (even without staticIP) and the VOIP will be useful if I need to do more work from home but as noted it really didn't cut it as a dual 3G/4G dongle router.

Probably the greatest indicator is that the RUT950 has gone over a week without needing a manual reboot. The 2860 required this anywhere from every 15 minutes to every 2 days. The VPN has only ever been unavailable for 10 minutes vs' a whole weekend because the 2860 refused to reboot...

Someone with more time could doubtless debug these issues but again I refer back to my original point... This is an high end product. You'd not expect customers to faced with what amounts to beta testing and debugging when they're forking out £250+ for a product that should really just get on and work.

Your observations/experience are not normal though - it's not how it works for me, or how it works for DrayTek so only by letting them know your results and seeing logs would they ever narrow it down. Someone else with your other router might similarly get different results and then say "the DrayTek works rock solid" etc... Still worth getting them a report at some point.

admin wrote: Your observations/experience are not normal though - it's not how it works for me, or how it works for DrayTek so only by letting them know your results and seeing logs would they ever narrow it down. Someone else with your other router might similarly get different results and then say "the DrayTek works rock solid" etc... Still worth getting them a report at some point.

As you say there's a lot of variance in different setups and on some things I conceded your point but things like Ping to Detect were broken for a number of firmware releases which is a bit slack when it's a pretty standard feature through various iterations of product. But I digress, I'll see what I can do to recreate the issues identified and then build a proper debug log when time and a small baby allow.

Right, that aside, I also have to admit to a level of overconfidence regarding my alternative solution as the past 5 hours have proven "interesting" with the RUT950 and with the documentation (or lack thereof) as well as tech support (or again, lack thereof).

What the unit does brilliantly is 3G and 4G connectivity and in that regard it avoids a key issue the Draytek routers can't avoid which is the interaction with one or more third party dongles. However one of my requirements has been VPN and in this I've discovered the RUT950 falls over quite badly. PPTP will connect but not route correctly and there is absolutely no guidance within a poorly written manual to help.

Just as an aside, if anyone is thinking of getting a Teltonika product I'd strongly recommend identifying a supplier/retailer that knows their stuff and will support you properly. Don't buy from the cheapest option! Not doing this has made the whole process of getting answers considerably more difficult.

Coming back to VPN, IPSec will only work over if your dongle/mobile router is getting a public IP for the Internet. For me this was 3G/4G via Three mobile. It does not work over EE. Not sure where I got the impression that EE was issuing Public IPs but they don't so be aware.

I also found that the RUT950 while it purports to provide bridge mode for mobile isn't a full implementation. You would need a static IP sim for it to work and to then set the LAN IP to that IP address in advance for it to bridge properly.... or at least that was the half-baked notion given by the support bod who really didn't understand the product too well. So, you can't use anything that will change public-IP with each reboot or reconnect because it's not passing on the IP address to it's parent router.

(tbc...)

Following from the post above, my solution now has been to go with the following setup:

> Draytek 7920Vn+ with dongle and EE sim providing gateway #1
> RUT950 with two separate sims from Three installed, providing gateway #2

All connectivity is handled by DHCP which sets the RUT950 as the primary gateway and the Draytek as the failover.

And as for VPN... the Three network provide the IPSec connectivity with the remote site via the RUT and PPTP is setup to allow a manual connection via the Draytek link if the IPSEC link has gone down.

It's a hell of a convoluted setup but means that we now have a full 30Gb of bandwidth allowance via Three. Further to that, we are not tied to just one mobile network, nor one specific device. Throw in that VPN Lan to Lan works properly and we're finally happy. I may take a step back from it all in a few months time when things are less frantic and see if there's a simpler setup but for now this is finally ticking the necessary boxes after more than 5 months of low grade issues.


Oh and last point in case anyone is thinking of copying this setup... Our DHCP is handled by a server on the local network so our wireless AP router is setup as a DHCP relay agent. That ensures the gateway information is correctly dispersed to the client connections and so they will find the correct gateway and not default to the gateway provided by the WLAN router.