Zyxel is a popular choice when it comes to both home and small business routers with a range of fixed and wireless products to choose from. The company also sells a wireless IP phone and recently added the VoIP enabled 2602HWL to its Prestige ADSL router family. This provides support for two local SIP phone connections although, at the time of testing, a bundled SIP service wasn't included.

As with all Zyxel hardware, the Prestige 2602HWL is well made and highly specified with, as well as an integrated four port Ethernet switch, an 802.11g, 54Mbps, wireless interface as standard. A UTP cable is included in the box together with a lead to connect the router to the ADSL line, plus adapters to allow ordinary UK-cabled phones to be connected. You also get emergency lifeline facilities, to make calls in the event of a power or hardware failure. Added to which users can choose to make either ordinary dial-up or IP calls. All of which will be attractive to small businesses although there's no built-in SIP server or PBX facilities, as on the Intertex router.

On the data side the 2602HWL is very well specified with a stateful inspection firewall and a VPN server with its own hardware-based encryption accelerator capable of handling up to 20 IPSec remote access tunnels. Support for network address translation (NAT) also comes as standard along with port mapping to allow for public access to local Web, mail and other servers.

On the downside, the browser based interface is a little cumbersome but it's pretty soon mastered with a wizard to help with the initial setup, both of the router and the SIP functionality. Unfortunately there's no bundled SIP service subscription, as on the Draytek and Zoom products, but a range of services can be used and we had no problem configuring and using the Zyxel router with Free World Dialup or Sipgate, which has a PSTN gateway.

Each phone port can be assigned its own SIP number on the Prestige router or a single number used on both and a single account shared. You can also specify the codecs to employ (the software used to encode/decode the voice traffic for IP transmission), with good results in all cases.

Suitable for small businesses and teleworkers looking for a mix of remote office networking and VoIP facilities, the only thing the Prestige 2602HWL lacks is a bundled SIP service. This is something Zyxel may soon address, although even if it doesn't, you still get a lot of functionality for the price and can always make your own arrangements on the service front.