Small office router with VPN - best hardware to use?

Five_Star · 9 Nov 2016 at 10:59

Hi

Looking for some advice for a small office router that supports good VPN and is stable for a 100mb Virgin media connection for an old work colleague who's found himself at a place with very limited IT support.

They have a DrayTek 2820 IPPBX (although do not use the PBX feature, now outsourced to a cloud VoIP provider)

The Draytek 2820 is terribly unreliable it seems, either dropping the connection or rebooting entirely.

What is a good alternative?
That offers a decent, secure VPN for 4-8 users?
That is also fairly easy to configure / update? so no CISCO kit

I was thinking something from ASUS with Asuswrt-Merlin on it, or something from Linksys with DD-WRT on?
My own home RT-N66 just never falls over so I cannot believe how poor the DrayTek device is.

As a 3rd choice would something from Ubiquiti be worth a look?
I hear good things on the forum about their kit and there WebUI seems to be coming along or is it too much for a small business that has limited support options? Set and forget is unfortunately their goal.

ChrisD. · 9 Nov 2016 at 11:46

The EdgeRouter Lite would be a good choice and sub £100. There's plenty of guides online about how to get it and VPN up and running.

Five_Star · 9 Nov 2016 at 13:05

Thanks

There is no comparison tool on the Ubiquiti site disappointingly.

What is the difference between the EdgeRouter Lite and the EdgeRouter X other than the 24v PoE? Is the core software the same?

From the DrayTek thread on here the Meraki Cisco MX65 looks like a really good solution, especailly given what I hear about the support option being there to hold their hands.

Does anyone have experience of the Meraki support process?

From both these options consumer Linksys / ASUS with 3rd party firmware looks a little weak now.

ChrisD. · 9 Nov 2016 at 13:09

I'm pretty sure there is a comparison tool of some form. X has less RAM and a weaker CPU, it's pps is lower than the ER-L.

bledd · 9 Nov 2016 at 13:29

Meraki is great, if you have the budget for it, for it. Remote management is awesome on it.

ov_sjo · 9 Nov 2016 at 14:03

How much bandwidth do you want to throw down VPN tunnels? That makes a big difference to your choice of router/VPN device.

Five_Star · 10 Nov 2016 at 07:35

ov_sjo said:
How much bandwidth do you want to throw down VPN tunnels? That makes a big difference to your choice of router/VPN device.

Nothing too heavy on VPN, mostly just office file access, but because they don't measure its usage I cannot accurately estimate what it might be, 4-5 users concurrently average.

Given how frustrated they are with DrayTek and their support, if I could show them how good Meraki support was I think they would make room in the budget for it.

ov_sjo · 10 Nov 2016 at 08:58

My personal recommendation would be a MikroTik RouterBOARD. You could probably get something to do the job for < £100. The spec of router will heavily depend on encrypted throughput though, hence my previous question.

Ultimately though Virgin cable has crap upstream so you should be fine with pretty much anything unless the majority of the workload is going from remote clients back into the network where the VPN router is located.

Glass · 10 Nov 2016 at 21:19

I would probably upgrade the Draytek to a newer model. They are actually very good pieces of kit for business.

If you can get away with a meraki for the wireless (i've just done a vid here on meraki for business)

What's the error log look like in the current draytek. Might it be the line that is the issue?

Five_Star · 11 Nov 2016 at 07:46

Glass said:
I would probably upgrade the Draytek to a newer model. They are actually very good pieces of kit for business.

If you can get away with a meraki for the wireless (i've just done a vid here on meraki for business)

What's the error log look like in the current draytek. Might it be the line that is the issue?

Cool, thanks for that video.

I haven't looked at the DrayTek as I'm not on site with them, but I did get the guy who tinkers at the company to at least update the firmware from 2012 to the latest version!

I know people say DrayTek are good for business, and a lot of the pro reviews do rate them but I hear a lot of instances like this https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18755510 from real world situations which does make you think are they really all that good?
(edit: looks like it was a bad cable in that thread!)

I'm still hopeful that I can get them a preview of the hand holding service from Meraki as I'm sure if it as comprehensive as described they'll spring the extra for it.

ChrisD. · 11 Nov 2016 at 08:12

My personal experience of using Draytek is that they're overhyped.

Armageus · 11 Nov 2016 at 08:31

Five_Star said:
I know people say DrayTek are good for business, and a lot of the pro reviews do rate them but I hear a lot of instances like this https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18755510 from real world situations which does make you think are they really all that good?

Dooksy said:
My personal experience of using Draytek is that they're overhyped.

I used to be a fan of Draytek, as we exclusively used them at Work, and I had a couple of older models at home. However, I do think quality has taken a nose dive recently for whatever reason, and have had issues both on the firmware side (bug that dropped DNS traffic?), and hardware related issues (Faulty PSUs on draytek ADSL Modems, Faulty PSU on 2830, faulty PSU on 3300).

Not really sure what else to recommend, as Draytek's do have a huge range of features at the price point. The only similar devices I can think of are Cisco's small business products (I.e. basically what used to be Linksys), as they offer some of the same Multi-wan style products at similar price points. Other than that it is your Ubiquiti, Microtik, PFSense style products, but they generally are a bit more "hands-on" in setting up and managing.