This article is part of a group review of six voice-enabled Wi-Fi routers

Zyxel has a well-deserved reputation for supplying solid products that meet the needs of small businesses. This is a good-looking product that does what it needs to, but lacks imagination.

Most of the boxes reviewed here come with an optional stand that enables them to be mounted upright; the Zyxel does away with this in favour of a tapered design that allows the device to be stood up on its end. Colour-coded ports and a slick user interface make it easy to set up. Functions are easy to find and change in the management screens.

DSL implementation is perfectly satisfactory, and includes some diagnostics. The system can also use a LAN port as an uplink.

Wi-Fi capabilities are good. The system boasts support for the WMM quality of service standard – useful for doing VoIP over Wi-Fi – but we didn’t test how effective this is. It has all the usual security options, including WPA2, and allows SSID to be turned off. It can also filter access by MAC address. The Wi-Fi can also be reconfigured as a bridge.

There are no USB sockets on the device, which is disappointing, but the phone ports are well implemented.

Zyxel gets good marks for making its VoIP implementation as close as possible to “real” telephony, but loses points for its lack of flexibility. The phone ports have the same dial-tone for internet and PSTN, and both allow dialling out over PSTN as well as VoIP. There is only room for two SIP accounts, and it is not possible to dial out on the PSTN for preference – you have to dial a preset code for the analogue dial-tone. One of the phone ports keeps its dial-tone when the box is switched off.

Read the conclusions of this group review...