Comments on: Where have all the dual WAN routers gone?

By: kdrac21

kdrac21 — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:15:11 +0000

Foxconn SFF… 130-200 to build and uses 20(ish) watts power… attach 2 2tb drives and a multi nic card , load balancing software and you have a multi-wan gateway, and home server….

setup… 2 in from wan… 1 out to router wan… 1 out to router lan (for filesharing)

By: Roy

Roy — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:52:00 +0000

OKay, but that would require a pull-blown PC to be on 24/7, sucking up 10-20 times the power a good router does? Not to mention that it doesn’t quite fit on the shelf where I currently have my modem. etc set up…

By: James Pearce

James Pearce — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 06:12:33 +0000

You can do this quite easily with PFSense: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi_WAN_/_Load_Balancing
You will need to roll out an x86 computer with PFSense router in the first place though. There are plenty of guides on the PFSense website on how to do this.

By: Harri

Harri — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:48:54 +0000

In our office we currently have two different connections, ADSL and a cable modem. We want to set up the network so that all VPN traffic is being routed via the DSL and all HTTP or other internet traffic is routed via the cable modem. Can anyone recommend a quality dual wan router, or otherwise? Currently we are running only off the ADSL.

By: Dude

Dude — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:41:28 +0000

Hey Roy,

The company I work for uses http://www.fusionappliances.com/products/interlink-gateway for a year now. We got tired of constant internet downtime (about 30min every day from our main ADSL provider) and me and the other sysadmin got fed up with constant bickering and having to change lines every day. So we proposed this to our tech manager and he agreed.

We’re about 30 employees using it and it works like a charm. It doesn’t “bond” connections and instead routing is done at TCP level from what I can tell. We’ve never needed to reset it and it’s got some other cool features. The bandwidth aggregation worked without any kind of tweaking right after I configured the two lines.

It’s an awesome business router and I’d buy one for home use, but it’s a little expensive for me

By: max

max — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 03:18:13 +0000

Hi roy,
you can try the Lanpro Lp-lb404, Cisco RV082 8-port 10/100 VPN Router – Dual WAN, Cisco RV016 16-port 10/100 VPN Router – Multi WAN, and many others depends how much you want to spend, but all this products works fine, I dont recomend Tp-Link products, I preffer to work with wired routers then use ap for wifi.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:39:46 +0000

I found all these oppinions in this forum very interesting. I added to favorites all the marks that were aforemencioned to check personally what products offers them.

I’m using Cisco RV082 (discontinued and with hardware prior to V3, not supported by Cisco) and I just looking a router similar Cisco RV016. I think that’s dificult to find another one same as Cisco RV016 characteristics, which has 5 WAN/LAN multirole ports but no 1000Mbps LAN ports; it hasn´t WiFi (but considering RV16 case is not an issue) and I’not sure about IPv6 support if hardware is prior to V3 that are hardware versions still supported by Cisco.

I can’t found in Cisco website if Cisco is selling a new version/edition/hardware similar to RV016 on their characteristics but “modernized” at least with 1000Mbps LAN ports, IPv6 capable, VoIP optimized etc. I will see on the sellers aforemencioned what I can find.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 30 May 2011 20:29:44 +0000

Roy,
Clearly it is not automatic load balancing, and it is not failover. If for instance you have one computer always downloading torrents and VoIP phones on the same LAN, you can use it to ensure that your torrents are not consuming the bandwidth for your VoIP phones.

The groovy part ios that all remains on the same LAN so you can still copy files across servers and shares no matter what broadband they connect to.

I too have employed the TP-Link Dual WAN routers and highly recommend them, that is as long as you are not using Polycom VoIP phones. as the DHCP server seems to fail with some models of the Polycom 301s and 500s. The polycoms are also quirky on the Linksys cisco dual WAN routes as well and the result there is they will always get the incorrect time from the router unless you happen to be at GMT 0.

I have yet to find a dual WAN router that does all that it claims. I did once install a Dlink that had the problematic Polycoms and it worked fine, although some VoIP phones had issues with the NAT on it.

By: Roy

Roy — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 21:30:47 +0000

Hi Mark, but the setup you’re describing, clever as it is, still doesn’t have automatic failover, right? And the only way to do load balancing is to change gateways on computers? Plus you need two router, which put together cost as much as a similar quality dual-wan router?

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:53:56 +0000

I have in the past thought I had a need for a dual WAN router but I have really found that it is really an unnecessary convenience even though I need internet and have 2 broadband connections.

All you really need to do is use 2 broadband connections each with its own router configured for the same subnet. Turn off DHCP on the router to be the secondary, define one routers LAN side IP to something like 192.168.1.1 and the other to something like 192.168.1.254. Now connect rthe LAN ports together and you have a single LAN with two internet gateways. If a new client connects he will get an IP dynamically from the primary connection router , because it has a DHCP server. If the primary connection fails or if some devices should always use the secondary connection , just give them a static IP using the gateway address of the secondary connection router’s IP.

And of course all devices are available on the same LAN

I will be posting this solution to http://www.teknogeekz.com in the blog section in detail