Brought the Vigor 167 a few weeks ago as I wanted try it out. For the last few months my connection has been stable at 49Mbps but refused to sync higher despite running for years at 69Mbps. I suspect this is something to do with the Vigor 166 I tried and had any number of issues with, but because the line was above BT’s guarantee they refused to send an engineer to reset it.
The Vigor 167 has now been in place for 2 weeks and the link is now syncing at 64Mbps and running stable. Overall the 167 seems to be a decent product, the CLI looks to have gone away and replaced by a GUI which gives you all the specs on your line, clean and simple to use so can’t complain.
Despite concerns raised by other users regarding the Draytek 167, which appear to be based around conjecture and opinion of the mediatek chipset rather than actual usage of the device, I have to say that my real world experience with the modem/router echoes that of AStalUK almost exactly and that I'm very pleased with the device used in modem mode, running the latest official firmware.
I originally used a HG612 on my FTTC Openreach line (leased via Zen Internet and around 275m from the green cabinet which is a Huawei), in the interest of using more modern hardware I "upgraded" to a Draytek 166, whch over a short period and many errors, had reduced my line speed from 72mb/s to around 62mb/s.
For this reason, I switched back to the HG612. Over time the the line stabilised, creeping back to around 68mb/s, but never returning to the initial sync speed prior to the introduction of the Vigor 166. I put the reduction in speed down to the line stabilising over time and decided I would simply live with the new rate and not risk making things worse by changing hardware further.
Fast forward a few months, I recently had a chance to test a Vigor 167 and as we're due to switch to FTTP shortly I thought I'd give it a go. I'd read that the new hardware had dropped G-Fast support and was specifically optimised for VDSL2 connections and if it all went wrong and I lost a chunk of speed, I'd soon be receiving a pure fibre connection anyway, so I really had nothing to lose!
Immediately upon installation of the Vigor 167, the line sync was around 2mb/s higher than with the HG612. Over the following two weeks the sync rate continued to rise with the modem now syncing around 78mb/s, resulting in a usable throughput of around 73/74mb/s. The ping has also improved by 2-4ms like for like when running tests on identical servers.
For comparison, over the past year, I've tested a Broadcom based Billion Modem on the line / Openreach ECI modem / The old faithful HG612 (standard and custom firmware) in additon to a Fritzbox 7530 operating as both a modem and combined modem / router.
Thus far, the Vigor 167 provides the most stable and consistent connection and is the only modem that has actually improved speeds, both upon initial installation and over time, presumably due to a reduction in errors on the line.
Overall, I'm really happy with the Draytek 167 and would recommend to anyone looking for a modern take on VDSL2 hardware that appears (at least on my line) to significantly outperform the default HG612.