Cisco 887/877 vs Draytek Vigor 2860/2850

I know this is a bit "chalk and cheese" but I am wondering if anyone can comment particularly in regard to the ADSL/VDSL chipsets on these two devices and which one tends to give the best throughput in a standard home configuration?

I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that back in the days the Draytek stuff tended to be better when it came to the ADSL stability and sync side of things than Cisco, which is quite understandable given the target customer etc... is this still true?

FTTC is *supposedly* coming to my area soon so it will be a choice between these two. On one hand the 887 tempts me, well, because its a Cisco, but my Vigor 2820 has been a totally class act for the past 5+ years and I imagine the 2860 would be too.

I have both 887VA and Draytek 2850/2850n/2860n+ routers on FTTC without an Openreach modem. I haven't had any reliability problems anywhere. All are on Zen connections.

Give me about a week and I'll test which works at what speed for you. The site with a 2860n+ syncs at 80/20 with maximum attainable shown as over 100/30 (although the 2860n+ doesn't actually show maximum attainable rate, I got the figures from the 2850n previously installed).

I've just got back from there having spent many hours trying to deal with a truly bizarre connectivity problem but the setup is so far removed from a typical domestic one (multiple VLANs, multiple VPNs and multiple firewall rules) that I don't think you should worry about it. I've never come across anything like it before. I've just fired off an email to Draytek to see what they say. Draytek support generally seems to be very good. I haven't needed Cisco support.

The 2860n+ on this connection shows slightly better latency results than the 2850.

It currently looks like this: My 2860n+ Ping

The 2850n on the same connection looked like this; My 2850n Ping

The following quote refers to ADSL compatibility but I have no doubt the VDSL2 compatibility is good too;

In reference to stewartandrews.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/cisco-cpe-and-compatibility...:

The 887VA and E-HWIC DSL interface card were tested extensively with Broadcom, Cisco and BT labs during pre-production development. The firmware is therefore known to offer excellent compatibility, performance and stability across all of BT�s ADSL services.

One annoying problem with the Cisco is that the current IOS has an NTP implementation vulnerable to exploitation so it's not possible to use NTP to synchronize the router's clock to an external source. Cisco has no workaround except to disable NTP completely. I'm hoping a patch or IOS upgrade to fix this is available before too long. See http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/Cisco...

Other points worth noting; the Cisco has 4 fast ethernet LAN ports, the current Draytek has six gigabit LAN ports. It can also do 3G/4G backup easily (I do that too)

For home use I am currently on a Cisco 857 but will switch to the 877VA (I already have one) when I move to FTTC. I use a separate hardware firewall so won't be using the Cisco for NAT or security.

I'll let you know when I've had time to have a play on the fast connection.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply, just the sort of info I am after

Quite peculiar those intermittent lag spikes on the 2850 aren't they?

As with Draytek quite a lot, the products get much better after a year or so after they have been released, as I know the 2860 seems to be getting some negative comments at the moment due to silly firmware bugs especially related to VPNs, but nice to see someone who is getting along with it already

The fast Ethernet ports on the Cisco 887VA is a fair negative imho, with a peak throughput of potentially 80Mbps from FTTC I am not sure 100Mbps FE ports is very clever, considering the expense of the device in the first place I would have expected GigE ports. Not that I'd use it for a switch, but that sort of design just irks me a bit. I'd rather they just include 1 GigE port instead! Though it does tempt me though due to IOS

Interesting you mention that Vulnerability, believe Zen are sending out emails to customers with affected equipment..

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

Interesting you mention that Vulnerability, believe Zen are sending out emails to customers with affected equipment..

Yes, I got one and shut down NTP within an hour and a quarter of receiving Zen's email and updated the fault online. It took them nearly three weeks to close the fault on their tracking system.

The Draytek bug I have isn't VPN related. It's to do with clients connected via ethernet on a particular RFC 1918 private IP range having intermittent connectivity to the Draytek and the internet. Packet loss is about 30% pinging the router and the same to the internet. Oddly enough, pinging a wireless client connected to the same LAN/VLAN gets zero packet loss even when packets are being dropped by the router.

It's not the client hardware as this works perfectly on a different IP range and also pings wireless clients on the affected range perfectly. I've swapped out the router from a 2850n to a 2860n+ and the fault persists. I've also swapped the client machine and tested with a laptop as well. It's truly bizarre.

Edited by caffn8me (Sat 15-Mar-14 22:58:37)

Just a note on Draytek support. I reported the problem on Saturday. Just after 10am today I'd had an email back telling me who would be dealing with it.

So far so good

Don't forgot the Cisco 887VA comes in different IOS flavours, you may need to buy a licence to unlock certain IOS features if you purchase the "wrong" model of the 887VA e.g. security or advanced IP services. AFAIK(please research yourself) the difference between the CISCO887VA-SEC-K9 and CISCO887VA-K9 is that the CISCO887VA-SEC-K9 has Advanced IP Services activated(saving you the cost of an activation licence).

I was toying with the idea of a Cisco 887VA but kept reading that it was a bit underpowered, eventually I bought an almost new Juniper SRX110H-VA off eBay(Junos is quite like Vyatta/Vyos/EdgeOS - take a look at the EdgeRouter Lite it's as nerdy as a Cisco but, faster, cheaper, has gigabit ports and you don't need a contract for software updates - also has busy community forum if you need help).

Edited by Spud2003 (Wed 19-Mar-14 01:34:37)

I've just migrated my home connection to Zen. I'm now synced at 79987 down and 19999 up.

It's on BT backhaul as opposed to Zen which gives really poor latency compared to the other Zen connections I manage - 24ms to www.bbc.co.uk compared to 5ms on the best connection. Even the slowest other connection which syncs at 34Mbps manages 17ms.

I don't use the Cisco for NAT, firewaling or VPN as I have a dedicated hardware firewall to do all that so the load on the router isn't great. It routes a static block of 8 IP addresses.

DLM has just turned my nterleaving off and I've managed 74.32Mbps download with 18.83Mbps up. This is on an exchange showing as amber for congestion so I think it's about as good as I'll be able to see.

The point is that I don't think the Cisco is slowing anything down.

Edited by caffn8me (Wed 06-Aug-14 04:56:14)

If you are looking at the Plusnet exchange congestion checker, I have a feeling that only looks at 20CN kit.