As if by magic, I've been contacted today and asked to set up a site to use multiple external ISP services for the same internal network. At the moment it has just one BT FTTC connection. I don't yet have address details so have no idea which other providers are available but it may well be that I'll use a Draytek 2800 series router for this. I'll let you know when I get a bit more information.

Draytek 2800 series

Good and reliable kit

Yes, I'd agree with that. I've used Draytek 2700 and 2800 routers for a few years. They've been rock steady and are also very configurable.

The only reason I'm not using one on my latest project (a new project today) is because the throughput is only 400Mbps and the client has gigabit FTTP but needs ADSL failover because the FTTP is so unreliable (SFR in France).

In reply to a post by caffn8me:

As if by magic, I've been contacted today and asked to set up a site to use multiple external ISP services for the same internal network. At the moment it has just one BT FTTC connection. I don't yet have address details so have no idea which other providers are available but it may well be that I'll use a Draytek 2800 series router for this. I'll let you know when I get a bit more information.

The addendum to this is that the London site I was asked to provide this at is very unlikely to need failover. I've now got the address and it has G.Fast. I think the problems are all wi-fi related but will confirm when I get a chance to visit. Meanwhile, the same client arrived in France yesterday just as their new FTTP connection fell over for thirteen hours. This is going to need ADSL fallback.

Have you looked at one of DrayTek's higher end products?
I believe the top of the range supports 10Gb.

I personally use a custom built PC with PFSense for my VM 500Mb connection.

Thanks
Dan

The higher end Drayteks lose the advantage of having a built-in DSL modem. I used to run two sites with Draytek 2860 routers on VDSL with 4G dongle backup and it worked extremely well. The older Draytek 2850 actually has two separate internal modems - one ADSL and one VDSL and both could be connected to different lines operating in parallel or failover mode. That's very neat.

In this case I'll almost certainly be using a WatchGuard firewall with SD-WAN.

There are a number of benefits WatchGuards have for the sort of setups I run including being able to establish VPN endpoints with a virtual tunnel interface. I'm pretty sure that's not something Draytek supports on any of their products. I certainly can't find a way to do it on the 2850 I'm about to swap out. I can do it on Ubiquiti very easily and Cisco supports it too.

One really major downside I've found with Draytek is that there's no way to create or edit a configuration offline, only connected to a live device.

I had one situation where a very complicated Draytek running configuration was corrupted which caused certain services to fail in a reproducible way. Doing a factory reset and uploading the backup configuration reintroduced the bugs because the downloaded configuration file was corrupted too. It's a propietary binary format and there's no way to fix it now that Draytools doesn't work.

Draytek's support could only suggest a factory reset and start building the configuration from scratch on the live device.

That's not easy remotely.