Last week’s internet failure in my home has made it very clear to me that I need a backup. Even my wife, who frequently works from home using Citrix, had a lot of trouble getting anything done. We really need to be online all the time. So the first thing I did was sign up for a second home broadband line. I’ll soon have both a cable and a ADSL(2+) connection. Now all I need to do is tie them together.

I thought about getting a second router, and putting up a second wifi network for the new connection. But that would mean I’d probably end up interfering with my current signal, and it’s not really an elegant solution. So I started looking into dual WAN routers. These routers accept two ‘inputs’, and allow you to route your traffic between the two using a set of user-defined rules (“torrents go left, email goes right”). What you end up with is a single LAN that uses both connections simultaneously. No need to switch networks when one goes offline, your router will do that for you.

Draytek only?

Almost all the dual WAN routers aimed at consumers and small businesses seem to have been discontinued. I was only able to find a couple of models by Draytek. Googling turned up other models by Linksys, 3com, Netgear and others, but all of them are no longer listed on their respective manufacturer’s websites. Most of the reviews and forum posts Google turned up were from 2007 or even older. Most of them were quite positive about the various products though.

So, am I wrong in thinking that these routers are really nifty, and would be ideal for my setup? Or is their disappearance a sign I should stay away from this type of solution? Or perhaps these routers simply turned out to be too expensive for consumers and sold poorly?

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