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http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor120.html

many people bought the Huawei U220 USB data modems a couple of years ago and use the T-Mobile service just for data. These were sold as "broadband replacement" services and cost GBP25/month on contract. There's no way I'm paying that much for 500Mb pcm. My data volumes usually are in the 1.5Gb per month for work and the odd yum -y update that sneaks by unnoticed.

I have one plugged into my Draytek Vigor home office router as a backup for when the broadband service goes down - it has a Solwise high gain antenna attached to it. I also have one plugged into my work Linux laptop ("it just works" with network manager).

TFA referenced in the TFA says: "Browsing means looking at websites and checking email, but not watching videos, downloading files or playing games."

WTF? I was sold "mobile broadband" - it's a data service, nothing is mentioned about browsing at all.

Draytek Vigor? I had actually never heard of the company before, but I've been doing some work with a UK firm beginning their push into the states and they shipped over Draytek appliances. The hardware platform seems very robust and full featured, the web interface didn't make me want to claw my eyeballs out and they haven't had any dropouts or other issues even with the hardware hiding in a toasty coatroom.

At work we've just picked up a Draytek Vigor 2820 ADSL router, it's a bit fuller featured than your usual home modem, and it also allows aggregating bandwidth between the built in ADSL modem and either a USB connected 3G modem or any other IP connection connected over ethernet. We use the latter connected to a vanilla ADSL modem. As a whole it seems to work pretty well, the web interface is nonstandard, but after a while I got used to it, and you can set it up to either keep both connections active, or only fail over to WAN2 at a predetermined bandwidth usage or on failure of WAN1 (built in ADSL). Not sure what the OP is looking for, but the Vigor is just what we were looking for. (they do other versions with built in wireless and voip)

It has been some months since I read the manual for this thing -- to help a client in Italy solve a connection problem -- but I remember being impressed by its feature set and the granularity of control it offers, not least among them QOS. I have no hands-on experience with this router, nor have I had time to read the responses already here. Hope this helps. http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor2800.html

That's a rather sweeping and largely inaccurate statement you just made. Sure some routers are only "firewalls" by virtue of utilising NAT, but more because that's the way they have been configured, not because of a design limitation. I'd class my Draytek DSL router as a "home router", but it's definitely something I'd class as a firewall as well - as far as I can ascertain it's using BSD's PF - and NAT is optional; mine is routing real IPs very nicely.

I'd stick with the advice of others re: do it with just a decent router, and don't bother with traffic shaping etc.

Here in the UK the best value small routers I've found are the Draytek range, sold by Seg, and quite highly reviewed.

The 2600G should be all you need for 179 quid (199 including a card of your own ), it does wired and wireless, the firewall is solid, and if you end up needing to filter you can do so quite easily.

Plus the user forums show that whilst there is the odd glitch and imperfection, but at least you can find other UK users to help when your ISP goes a bit weird.

I have no connection with them, but I'm a happy user of their products in the UK

I'd stick with the advice of others re: do it with just a decent router, and don't bother with traffic shaping etc.

Here in the UK the best value small routers I've found are the Draytek range, sold by Seg, and quite highly reviewed.

The 2600G should be all you need for 179 quid (199 including a card of your own ), it does wired and wireless, the firewall is solid, and if you end up needing to filter you can do so quite easily.

Plus the user forums show that whilst there is the odd glitch and imperfection, but at least you can find other UK users to help when your ISP goes a bit weird.

I have no connection with them, but I'm a happy user of their products in the UK

The dialling is a bit complicated but you can set up common numbers in the router.

It also has the problem of only being able to phone other VOIP systems but for the home worker connecting to the office (that has a VOIP exchange) it would be ideal.

Zero cost phone calls to colleagues.