A full-featured router with 802.11ac Wi-Fi suitable for the advanced home setup or office.

DrayTek’s Vigor 2925ac is an NBN-ready wireless router that puts an emphasis on security and offers extensive network controls for traffic and users. You can tell that it’s more than a consumer-level router from the moment you glance at it. The ports are on the front, rather than at the back, and they are there to facilitate quicker connections and troubleshooting to wired gear. It’s not a big router; it has three external, removable antennas, and it can sit on a desk happily — you’ll just have to manage the connected cables a little differently.

Business users will most likely want this router, but mostly business users who also know more than a bit about networking, or who have someone who can set it up and manage it for them. It’s not as straightforward as a consumer router in the sense that it offers plenty of customisaton for security and quality of service, as well as content filtering (via DrayTek’s MyVigor service) and traffic analysis (via a utility that can be downloaded called SmartMonitor). If all that is required is a simple router with which to get users online and share some files across a local network, then this router will go to waste.

Instead, this router is a specialist product for businesses with higher-end connection needs, including redundant Internet connections, and VPN and user management, primarily for the purpose of bringing connectivity to two or more offices and managing site-to-site backups. There is support for up to 50 VPN tunnels, and up to eight remote Vigor routers can be managed centrally via embedded management software.

It’s a router that also facilitates finer bandwidth restrictions than a consumer-level router, with controls in place not only for quality of service, but also for limiting user sessions. Furthermore, administrators can monitor Internet usage to see what sites and resources their users have been accessing, getting a glimpse into which users are taking up the most bandwidth.