DrayTek Wireless LAN Management
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Introducing DrayTek Wireless Management
Wireless LAN or "WiFi", as it's commonly known, is ubiquitous - it's used every day for smartphones, laptops, tablets and even home multimedia such as smart TVs, audio systems and games consoles. Wireless LAN provides convenience, flexibility and freedom but with today's widespread and sheer volume of use, it has become ever more important to control, monitor and maintain their efficiency, performance and security.
DrayTek's wireless management solutions allow you to provide reliable and efficient site-wide wireless LAN coverage. Management ensures that you also keep control of your wireless access points and clients (users/devices) to ensure best performance, coverage and security across a home office, building or whole campus. At a glance you can see what's going on. DrayTek's solutions are scalable, affordable and intuitive.
Benefits of Wireless Management
1. Coverage, Performance & Flexibility
Mobility across a larger office, building or campus is important to so many users. Being able to take use your laptop, tablet or other device around the building or site
and be sure of reliable coverage throughout makes your working life easier.
With that site-wide coverage, your device can switch from one DrayTek access point to another automatically. To ensure the best performance in high traffic areas, load balancing can spread your wireless traffic across multiple access points in the same location.
2. Monitoring & Reporting
With any larger deployment of wireless or shared Internet access, it becomes ever more important to know about the users and traffic on your wireless LAN.
DrayTek's reporting logs user activity and traffic levels as well as real-time at-a-glance status reports, helping you to identify bottlenecks, high traffic areas or unacceptable traffic levels for specific users.
3. Control & Security
Wireless makes it very easy to connect to your network but also easy for unwelcome users.
DrayTek's control and security facility ensure that only users you want to have access can get access, and only to the parts of the network they need to, at the times they need to.
Private and guest networks can be fully isolated and access points can be automatically configured.
4. Affordable
As you'll learn later, DrayTek wireless management doesn't need any special hardware or dedicated controller so it's affordable and scalable even for very small or modest requirements as well as larger ones.
No Specialist Controller |
Wireless Management is built into DrayTek's standard routers (Vigor 2762, 2862, 2926, 2952, 3220 & 3910); no specialised controller or additional hardware, software or licensing is needed. For the access points (the wireless base stations which you install around your office or home), again, these are standard DrayTek products (which can also be used standalone). This means that you might already own suitable DrayTek products, or if you buy these standard products now but have only modest or simple wireless requirements initially, you can make use of wireless management later once your requirements grow. |
Mobility |
With a larger office, building or estate, if you move around, you're soon out of range of a single wireless access point (base station). As well as distance, walls, floors and other obstructions will reduce your signal strength and thus your connection reliability and speed. By installing DrayTek access points at the optimum locations around your site and managing them centrally, you can create coverage across your whole site so that you can move from one area of your building to another and be sure of reliable coverage, and when your device moves out of coverage of one access point, it automatically and transparently reconnects to another. With the optional use of 802.1x authentication, this process is made even more seamless. |
Load-Balancing |
Any type of wireless LAN provides finite bandwidth (maximum throughout); that capacity has to be shared by all devices using that access point and wireless channel. As more devices connect and transfer data, the speed available to each client becomes less. The solution to this is to have more than one access point in each location and to spread the clients across them. DrayTek's wireless LAN management allows you to 'load balance' your wireless traffic by setting maximum capacities for each access point (AP), either by the number of active clients or current traffic levels. When any AP is at capacity, it will force any new clients to connect to a different access point. Alternatively, the AP can be set to disconnect any idle device or a device which would be better served by a nearer AP. |
Traffic Graph |
Graphs showing the traffic flowing through each of your access points, and which clients are using the most can be viewed showing real-time and historical activity over the last period. This makes it easy to detect bottlenecks or traffic types which need to be reduced or extra provision allowed for. |
AP Status |
Within the management screens, you can, at a glance, see how many clients are connected to each of your access points, the traffic throughput and many other vital statistics of your complete wireless estate. This includes APs connected directly to your LAN and also those set up in WDS/Repeater mode (extending your Wireless LAN wirelessly). You always know what's going on. |
Station list |
You can also see a list of all connected clients/stations and what their own individual usage looks like. This also helps to determine bottlenecks, usage patterns and WLAN efficiency. |
AP Map |
A visual map of your site can be uploaded into the management interface in order to accurately plot the location of your access points on the site plan. You can select between multiple floor plans (for different floors or outbuildings). |
Auto-Provisioning |
For ease of deployment, a pre-set configuration can be set up within the controller so that when any new access point is added, it can automatically provision itself, downloading its setup from the controller - true zero touch configuration. |
AP Maintenance |
From within the management interface, you can also initiate backing up or restoring configurations to any or all access points, upgrade their firmware or reboot any access point. |
Rogue AP Detection |
The management system will show you any access points which are trying to connect to your LAN in order that you can locate and/or stop them from doing so (they would already fail authentication of course so would not have LAN/WAN access). |
Temperature Monitoring & Alarm |
DrayTek VigorAP 903 and VigorAP 810 wireless access points allow connection of an optional temperature sensor. Through the management system, you can therefore see the temperature around your building at a glance, pinpointing areas which may be overheated or underheated, allowing you to save heating costs and therefore energy consumption. |
DrayTek Vigor Routers with Central AP Management
The central component, the management interface of the DrayTek wireless management system, is built into our Vigor 2765, 2865, 2927, 2962 and 3910 series routers. It comes as standard, so you don't need to pay for any service activation or per-node licencing and it supports up to 2, 20, 30 or even 50 compatible DrayTek Access Points (depending on router model). If you need a local controller that can monitor up to 100 nodes, use VigorConnect.
The Vigor router can just be used as the wireless management device, but of course, they are fully featured router/firewalls in their own right, so likely will form the key component of your border network protection.
The Vigor 2765 and Vigor 2865 include support for ADSL and VDSL, whereas the Vigor 2927 and other series have Ethernet WAN Ports.
For full details and specification of these products, click here:
DrayTek VigorAP range Access Points
DrayTek's VigorAP 903, AP-960C and AP-912C are the ideal access point components of a DrayTek managed wireless system. They can be powered by PoE, negating the use or provision of local power and support simultaneous dual band (2.4 & 5Ghz) easing congestion on the most congested 2.4Ghz band (for devices which can support 5Ghz). Their Ethernet uplink is full speed Gigabit, ensuring that the wireless LANs are fed at its maximum speed. The VigorAP 903 also features two wired LAN interfaces and a 4-port switch meaning that it can be used for wireless LAN bridging applications whereas the AP-960C and AP-912C are designed for ceiling or wall mounting.
The VigorAP 960C features Wi-Fi 6, which offers greater efficiency through the use of OFDMA, along with BSS Colouring which enables more access points to safely overlap coverage.
For business class high-density wireless solutions, use the VigorAP 1000C or VigorAP 1060C.
The VigorAP 1000C Tri-Band access point features dual 5GHz radios for double the client capacity.
The VigorAP-1060C Wi-Fi 6 access point provides 2.5Gb Ethernet uplink capability, with wireless capacity to match and support for up to 16 SSIDs (8 per radio instead of 4).
Also available is the Vigor AP-810. The AP-810 supports all of the wireless management features of the VigorAP 903 but does not support dual-band wireless, temperature sensors or Gigabit wired ports - see the comparison chart table below.
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* - Not available on the VigorAP 802 Plug AP
‡ - Not available VigorAP 810 / 710 & VigorAP 802
Low TCO
Unique to DrayTek, the wireless management features are built into several of our business class routers - you do not need to purchase an additional separate wireless controller, nor specific 'managed' wireless access points.
The management interface is available on all Vigor 2765, 2865, 2927, 2962 and 3910 series routers and it supports management of all of DrayTek's VigorAP wireless access points. These are standard products within our range and there are no subscription fees, activation fees or node-based licensing. This means that it costs no more than the cost of the products and with no ongoing fees, the TCO (total cost of ownership) is vastly lower than most other wireless management solutions.
Comparison
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| VigorAP 802 | VigorAP 810 | VigorAP 903 | VigorAP 912C | VigorAP 960C | VigorAP 1000C | VigorAP 1060C | VigorAP 918RPD | ||||
| Plug-in | Desk / Wall | Desk / Wall | Ceiling / Wall | Ceiling / Wall | Ceiling / Wall | Ceiling / Wall | Outdoor Wall/Pole |
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Wireless Bands |
2.4 & 5.8GHz | 2.4GHz | 2.4 & 5GHz | 2.4 & 5GHz | 2.4 & 5GHz | 2.4 & 2x 5GHz (Tri-band) | 2.4 & 5GHz | 2.4 & 5GHz | |||
Wireless Standard |
802.11ac | 802.11n | 802.11ac Wave 2 |
802.11ac Wave 2 |
802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 | 802.11ac Wave 2 |
802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 | 802.11ac Wave 2 |
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Traffic Graph |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
AP Status |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
Station List |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
Auto-Provisioning |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
AP Maintenance |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
Load-Balancing |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
Rogue AP Detection |
Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
Temperature Monitoring |
- | - | Yes | - | - | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
IMPORTANT NOTE: Exact features supported and how managed wireless operates depends on the model of access point and controlling router in use. Please check current firmware support. Specification and interface depicted in screenshots is subject to change. Feature support may also depend on the client device (laptop, tablet, phone etc.) and operating system in use so exact compatibility, performance and user experience will vary. For 5Ghz band support, you must have a wireless device which supports that band.
Disclaimer: All information is believed to be correct at the time of writing but subject to change. Trademarks: Reference to or images/logos of any 3rd party product or company is purely for illustrative purposes only and does not imply any alliance with or endorsement from/to that 3rd party or its products.