SmallNetBuilder

Introduction

For their second review, I asked Draytek to suggest a single WAN N router and they came back with the 2110n. But I know SmallNetBuilder readers hunger for Gigabit ports on their N routers, so I instead asked them to send the 2130n for review.

The 2130n is aimed at fiber Internet connections with around 800 Mbps of routing speed, according to Draytek, and has features similar to its older sibling, the Vigor 2910G, minus the dual WAN ports. I was told that it's the first Draytek router to support SMB file sharing from a USB attached drive and sports a completely rewritten OS.

The 2130n comes in tower-style case that is not designed to be laid down. But Draytek has included screw mounting slots on the back cover so that you can wall mount it if you like. Figure 1 provides the rundown on all the indicators, controls and ports.

Figure 1: 2130n front and rear panels

All ports are 10/100/1000 and can be configured using the controls shown in Figure 2. You can check port status and set port speed, enable / disable Flow Control, set frame size for jumbo frames (up to 9600 Bytes), control excessive collisions and set port power saving modes.

Figure 2: LAN Port settings

If you check the options under the LAN heading in the left-hand menu, you can see more "smart" switch functions built into the 2130n. You control the switch MAC address table and set up VLANs, monitor ports and static routes. And of course, using the Bind IP to MAC function, you can reserve IP addresses for specific clients.

The sample that Draytek sent didn't have an FCC ID printed on it. But Draytek tends to just register the radio portion of their wireless routers, so I had to open the 2130n up anyway. The good news is that Figure 3 shows a hefty heatsink over what appears to be a single SoC that contains the processor and Gigabit switch ports. But bad for me, since it meant more digging to ID the processor.

Figure 3: 2130n board

Fortunately, Draytek provides SSH access to the 2130n's console. So I fired up PuTTY and found BusyBox upon login. After some digging around, I wasn't able to identify the exact device. But the processor was called out as ARM926EJ-S based and there was a reference to Vitesse WebRocX. Bing actually beat out Google in providing this link, which refers to "Vitesse WebRocX chips". But this page lives on a staging server and a search for WebRockX on the main Vitesse site comes up empty.

The other components are 64 MB of RAM and 8 MB of flash, a Vitesse VSC8601 Gigabit Ethernet PHY for the WAN port and a Microstar International MS6893 mini-PCI 2.4 GHz radio module. The MS6893 uses a Ralink RT2880F 2T3R MAC/BB probably mated with an RT2820 2.4 GHz transceiver.