DrayTek Vigor 2850n review

Annoyingly, though, the Vigor 2850n can’t transmit on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously, which puts it at a severe disadvantage in comparison with other high-end routers such as AVM’s Fritz!BOX WLAN 7390 – if you have 2.4GHz-only devices such as many smartphones, you’ll need to do without the super-fast 5GHz mode to get them online. However, it does compensate with other impressive features, such as its web portal option. This lets you redirect users to a specific URL when they first log on to the router. It also has a web content filter, which prevents users accessing specific URLs. Even though the controls reside on the router, letting you block or allow access to certain content for any connected computer, you need to subscribe to DrayTek’s GlobalView service in order to use them. The Vigor 2850n’s firewall is also of note, being extremely customisable, and there are comprehensive bandwidth controls to help you get the most out of your internet connection and control your network traffic effectively.

If you don’t use its USB port for internet access, you can attach a USB flash drive, hard disk or USB printer to the Vigor 2850n to share over the network. DrayTek provides excellent instructions for adding a USB printer to your network, and we quickly configured a colour laser printer for the role. If you attach a USB drive, any connected PCs can use it as network-attached storage. You can even create specific users and grant them specific access rights to the storage. Annoyingly, the Vigor 2850n only recognises drives formatted with a FAT32 or FAT16 filesystem, rather than NTFS.

If you find the options on your present router limiting or if you need a high-quality router with multiple WAN connections should the main internet connection fail, you probably need the Vigor 2850n. It can connect to a variety of different internet sources and is incredibly fast. It isn’t as user-friendly as the AVM Fritz!Box Fon WLAN 7390, but it’s a powerful unit that rightly deserves its Business Buy award.