QoS and the Home Office Worker

How your home and business can prepare for Gigabit broadband

Getting ready for Gigabit speed – unleash the potential

 If lockdowns have taught us anything over the past year, it is the importance of great home broadband. Whether it’s for virtual meetings, gaming, streaming movies or just plain surfing, we now realise how essential it is that our router can handle high demand from multiple wired and wireless users at the same time.

At the moment, however, performance is often patchy, slow and frustrating. The great news is that the country is in the process of being upgraded to allow data speeds of up to 1Gbps. That’s 1 Gigabit per second – which means you could download an entire HD movie in less than a minute, more than enough data capacity to keep everyone in your household or business office happy.

To take advantage of it, you’ll need to upgrade your router – and that’s where DrayTek comes in, offering not just the benefit of faster speeds, but also many other security and performance improvements. Read on to find out more.

FTTC to FTTP

Optical fibre cables are one of the fastest and most reliable ways to transfer data. Sometimes just called fibre, these cables are standard across the core of the broadband network – between ISPs, web hosts and telcos. For about 75% of homes, however, the fibre cable doesn’t go right to the door, only to your local green roadside cabinet. The final stretch from the cabinet to your home travels on copper telephone wires. These give much slower speeds than fibre and are subject to interference, which is why the actual speed of your connection might not match the advertised speeds. This set-up is known as FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) with the main service type being VDSL2 or G.Fast  (ADSL is different – it doesn’t have streetside cabinets but comes all the way from the telephone exchange and is even slower, max 25Mbps – megabytes per second).

If you have FTTC (VDSL2) in the UK, you will probably be getting download speeds of about 60Mbps, although it could be lower or higher, depending on your service provider, the distance from your home to the cabinet and the quality of the wiring.

Speeds of around 60Mbps just isn’t sufficient for future broadband usage levels. Even now, if several people want to stream 4K movies, your ‘copper line’ might struggle.  So, over the next 15 years, it’s intended that nearly every home and office in the UK will get optic fibre cables right to their door, a service known as FTTP (Fibre To The Premises), or ‘full-fibre’. This will allow the super speeds of up to 1Gbps, which is why it is also known as Gigabit Broadband. Project Gigabit is a government-led initiative to accelerate the FTTP rollout to rural areas. This rollout is happening from 2022. It and other expansion plans should mean that FTTP reaches 85% of English homes by 2025.  

Get the right router

If plans keep to schedule, full fibre broadband will be available for most homes and offices by 2035. BT Openreach will supply you with a connection box called an ONT (optical network terminal). That ONT is the equivalent to your DSL model, but for fibre.  YYou won’t be able to take advantage of the higher speeds automatically though – that depends on your router. A router which isn’t fast enough will result in a bottleneck on your line so you won’t be taking full advantage of your fibre connection.

For great results, you will need a router that is designed for bandwidths of 1Gbps, and which offers other benefits too. Without a suitable router, your broadband performance will be restricted – even if there is full fibre broadband to your home.

DrayTek are industry leaders in routers and offer several models that can deal with Gigabit broadband – or faster. For families and small businesses, the Vigor 2927 series offers you many additional benefits compared with a standard router. This investment will future-proof your home or office and give you peace of mind for many years, in terms of security, speed, connectivity and performance.

Vigor 2927 features include:

• Gigabit Speed
• 2 Ethernet ports
• 5 dedicated LAN ports
• Up to 2 active WANs
• Can be adapted for wireless WAN
• Up to 50 VPN connections/users
• QoS (Quality of Service Assurance)
• Firewall & Content Filtering

VPN

One area that will be of growing importance is internet security. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) creates an encrypted connection between connected routers and devices. This allows for much greater security than standard internet connections – essential for those working from home with sensitive commercial information, transferring data to the cloud, to your office/HQ, to colleagues or just wishing to access streaming services from other parts of the world.

With Draytek’s Vigor 2962 and Vigor 3910, you get both Gigabit speed and amazing VPN performance as part of the package, as well as services like load balancing, and high-availability to provide your WAN infrastructure with even more fault-tolerance. With load balancing, your router takes advantage of two or more WAN (Internet) connections, spreading your connections out over them or switching to one WAN connection if the other fails or has a fault. This is vital for mission critical applications where you can’t afford to be offline. DrayTek also have solutions which can switch to cellular connections. Rest assured that all DrayTek products will work with your internet provider.

DrayTek Vigor 2962 features include:

• 5Gb Ethernet Dual-WAN Firewall Router & VPN Concentrator
• Up to 50 VPN users

DrayTek Vigor 3910 features include:

• 10Gb Enterprise Level High-Performance VPN Concentrator with Powerful 1.2GHz Quad-Core Processor
• Up to 500 VPN users