The new Draytek 3200 router became available last Thursday from what appears to be a major Draytek supplier in the UK. I've been awaiting this device for a number of months so I ordered one, as well as the rather expensive for what it is RM1 19" rackmount bracket, with a view to replacing my aging Draytek 3300V.

The router arrived this past Saturday and I spent much of the afternoon and evening configuring and then reconfiguring it. It should be noted that only the 3200 appears to be in stock. The 3200n (which has built in wireless) is not currently available. Given my wireless needs are taken care of by separate access points, I was only ever interested in the 3200.

The 3200, like the 3300V, is a quad WAN port router featuring 4 Ethernet ports. Unlike the 3300V, the 3200 has 4 x Gigabit Ethernet WAN ports instead of just 4 x 100Mbit Ethernet WAN ports and an advertised potential throughput of up to 150Mbit. The 3200 naturally has Gigabit Ethernet LAN, albeit only a single LAN port rather than 4 LAN ports as on the 3300V. However as I planned to connect a Gigabit Ethernet switch directly to the LAN port, I wasn't bothered about additional ones. Finally a dedicated DMZ port is also provided. I haven't yet tested the DMZ feature.

I have connected 3 WAN devices to my 3200. WAN1 is ADSL2+ with a maximum download speed of ~5Mbit and an upload speed of 1Mbit (static IP connection). WAN2 is Virgin Media cable with a maximum download speed of 50Mbit and an upload speed of 1.5Mbit (DHCP connection). WAN3 is VDSL2 FTTC including a /29 subnet with a maximum download speed of ~37Mbit and an upload speed of ~8Mbit (PPoE connection). It is now possible to allocate static IP pools to any of the WAN inputs rather than just WAN1 which was one of the disadvantages of the 3300V.

I have tested throughput on the 3200 by using one computer to download via WAN2 at 50Mbit and another computer to download via WAN3 at whatever the FTTC VDSL2 connection could manage. I've also run multiple speed tests on WAN2 and WAN3 using speedtest.net and other sites. I'm pleased to report that the 3200 allows me to utilise the full 50Mbit Virgin Media cable connection at maximum throughput without problem. I am also able to get 30Mbit+ out of my FTTC VDSL2 connection on WAN3 at the same time. I suspect I will be able to run both connections simultaneously at their maximum download speeds without any problem. Unfortunately my FTTC VDSL2 connection doesn't appear to be as stable as my Virgin Media cable connection; I haven't been able to maintain a constant maximum download speed for long tonight.

I haven't managed to successfully establish any IPsec VPN connections. I've previously had multiple connections running between my 3300V and other Draytek routers including a 2820n and a 2900. I have recently replaced the 2900 with a 2920n, which is a dual WAN router that also supports 150Mbit throughput. I spent much of yesterday evening trying to establish an IPsec LAN to LAN tunnel between the 3200 and the 2920n but without success. I intend to keep trying because I would like to measure the throughput of that between the FTTC VDSL2 connection here, and another Virgin Media 50Mbit connection elsewhere. I'm hoping to achieve 8Mbit (the maximum upload speed of my FTTC VDSL2 connection) from here to there over IPsec.

I had a bit of an issue with firmware versions, which delayed me posting this until today. Given I couldn't get the VPN side of things working, between the 3200 and the 2920n, I wondered whether there were issues due to the 3200 having fewer VPN options than the recently updated 2920n (which is running 3.3.6). It was at that point that I realised that draytek.com were advertising a new firmware for the 3200 (3.3.6.1). I decided to flash the 3200 to that. It worked but when the router rebooted, the web interface would not load. I had to spend some time using Draytek Router Tools to reflash the 3200 and eventually the web interface loaded fine. What was interesting was even when the web interface wouldn't display, the 3200 worked perfectly with the configuration I had deployed earlier. After reflashing several times I had to reconfigure the 3200 again from scratch but that didn't take me long. I'm now running 3.3.6.1 on it with an interface which matches that of the 2920n running 3.3.6.

It doesn't appear to be possible, anymore, for each of the WAN connections to have their own independent DNS. Unless one force chooses two DNS server entries under LAN (e.g. Google's or OpenDNS), The LAN side appears to default to using those of WAN1. At least this is what appeared to be the case on the Online Status page of the router.

I prefer the general user interface of the 3200 over the 3300V. It's more like the newer Draytek routers (the 3300V interface was quite different to other Draytek interfaces).

The 3300V had more interface logging for features such as the VPN. The 3200 doesn't so I am not currently aware of why my VPN tunnels aren't connecting. It might be the case that I need to output to a syslog server to find this out, unless I have missed something. As this is similar to the 2920 series, perhaps someone using one of those can assist.

Both taken at the same time, although 71 other users did speedtests at the same time as me (the difference between the two result ID numbers).

Thanks for the post David.
If it works out better then the 3300v I will get one next time I need a 4 WAN unit later in the year.

I dont need the gigabit LAN as I am feeding wireless devices only but I do want somthing stable and that works without 100's hours work to find a stable firmware.

I downgraded my last 3300v to 2.5.9 as the latest 2.6.3 one did not work for this unit.

Hi David,

Thank you for taking the time to give a detailed account of your experience

I'm looking at getting the 3200 for my office here as well as for one of our other offices and also a 2920 for another smaller office with the plan of using the VPN connections to connect our offices together. Did you manage to get to the bottom of the issues you were having with the VPN?

Also, do you know if the 3200 is or will be IPv6 compliant? Given how new it is I would hope it is already!

Many thanks,

Rach