DrayTek Vigor Routers - Initial Wireless Setup – Draytek

The Wireless LAN interfaces of DrayTek Vigor routers can be easily configured to allow wireless clients to connect and access the Internet and local network.

It can be useful in many scenarios to check for nearby wireless networks before picking the wireless channel for the Vigor Wireless Router to operate on, primarily due to interference with other access points, which can cause lower than expected transfer speeds and potentially packet loss and increased latency, when the Router and wireless clients need to re-send packets.

On the 2.4GHz frequency band, this is especially important because there is an overlap in frequency for the majority of the 2.4GHz channels, effectively resulting in only channels 1, 6 and 11 not overlapping with each other.

This guide demonstrates how to configure the wireless network of the router so that it will be secure and provide good speeds to wireless clients, with minimal interference.

1. AP discovery

Wireless Channel Survey

Before setting the channel that will be used it is a good practice to perform a wireless scan to find out which channels are already in use by nearby devices. 3rd party WLAN scanner applications can assist with this, or the Access Point Discovery facility in the router's web interface can be used to look for nearby wireless networks that it can detect, to recommend which channels could have the least interference from other wireless networks.

Go to [Wireless LAN] > [AP Discovery] and in Access Point Discovery

1. Click the Scan button to scan the network. Please note that while the router is scanning for nearby networks, wireless clients will not be able to communicate with the router for around 10 seconds.

Once that has completed, the Access Point List will populate with wireless networks that the router has detected.

2. Click on Statistics to view the router's channel recommendations:

This will load the Site Survey Statistics, which will recommend wireless channels to use based on which channels have the fewest wireless networks already on those channels:

More information about interpreting these results is available in the Wireless LAN Channels article.

2. Selecting the Wireless Channel

Go to the [Wireless LAN] > [General Setup], set the channel to the recommended one (this example uses channel 4, recommended by the router in step 1).

Then enter the SSID (wireless network name); avoid special characters and spaces because some WLAN clients can have difficulty with these characters. A name such as "DrayTek_WiFi" should have good compatibility with different wireless clients.

Click OK to save and apply the settings.

More details about Wireless LAN Channels

3. Configuring Security

Wireless Security Configuration

After naming the wifi network it should be secured with WPA2/PSK mode.

Go to [Wireless LAN] > [Security], and for each of the configured SSIDs select WPA2/PSK as the mode.

Enter the Pre-Shared Key which is the password that clients will need to enter to connect to the wireless network. Please note that at least 8 characters are required (upper or lowercase characters, numbers and special characters allowed) and a longer pass-phrase will provide stronger security than a short pass-phrase.

It is recommended use WPA2 security with AES encryption where possible because WPA2/AES provides higher throughput and stronger encryption than the older WPA/TKIP security or WEP security methods. Using WEP or WPA/TKIP will limit wireless speeds to 54mbps (802.11g speeds).

Other useful wireless setup guides