TP-Link TD-W9970 vs Billion 8800NL R2 as modems

So I have had the TP-Link TD-W9970 for a few months now and have "tweaked" it in order to supply stats from telnet. I have found that getting stats over wifi will intermittently stop and I suspect the wifi reliability. I have found a way to get Stats from telnet over the WAN cable as my Asus router and W9970 are 30m apart with one ethernet cable so am testing now to see if it actually is wifi reliability and not telnet locking up. W9970 gets a sync of 66mbps @ 5dB on my line which is about as good as it gets.

Today I received a Billion 8800 NL R2 to test. The TP-Link is easy to set up just go to quick setup and select DSL type and bridge and that is it. The Billion's Quick Setup is neither quick nor a full setup. You have the same Quick Setup menu option select bridge and the setup declares you have successfully setup the WAN connection, but you havent there is more to it.

As this page shows there are another two steps in order to be able to connect and for the modem to negotiate the correct speed. These steps are to set the VLAN ID 101 in most cases and to enable Group Isolation. As soon as I enabled group isolation my internet sprang into life. The remaining procedure on the page linked to is not necessary if you want to access the router and stats over the WAN cable.

Once I had configured the VLAN the speed of negotiation went from 54mbps to 64mbps, which is just 2mbps lower than TP-Link using same cables and setup.

So I summary the TP-Link is the easiest to setup, gets the maximum sync you can expect for VDSL2 but wireless at the moment may be a bit iffy. Hopefully, new firmware may fix the wireless instability if it is that. The Billion has had several tweaks in firmware to fix Wifi stability according to the release notes on the firmware. If the seller hadn't pointed me to the previously linked page I would still be struggling to set up the Billion in bridge mode!

Just an addendum to the above post, I have received an Asus N53 Dual band dongle and pinging the Wireless on the TD-W9970 is getting lots of dropped packets which was my original problem with an Ralink dongle so looks like the wireless on the TP-Link is not very stable. Might be a firmware bug will have to contact TP-Link.

Been in touch with TP-Link and there is a new beta firmware out next week for V1 to address wireless stability on the TD-W9970.