Dual / Multi-WAN, possible to get best of both worlds?

[RamGuy]

Okay here is the thing, we've got two internet connections to our house, one for my parents living upstairs and one of me living downstairs from two different internet service providers.

They've got a optical fiber connection from "Homebase" providing 25/25mbit with response times at around 1-10ms when communicating with servers inside Norway, and normally 30-60ms when communicating with servers around in Europe and 80-120ms when communicating with servers around the world. That's the real magic and benefit from optical fiber, you get some really good and stable connections with low ping.

I on the other hand is sitting on a coaxial connecting run by "Get" providing 120/10mbit with response times at around 45-70ms when communicating within Norway, and normally 70-100ms when communicating with servers around Europe and anything from 120-300ms when communicating with servers around the world. This connection is awesome for one thing and that's providing good download speeds for a great price (I get dealer prices at work) but the ping is less than ideal compared to our optical fiber connection as well as the uploads being limited to 10mbit is a real pain when trying to stream HD, as well as uploading 1080P on the web and various things at the same time.



This all bring us this topic, as we would love to combined the benefit of both connections using some sort of dual-WAN solution like the Cisco RV042G, pfSense or some other router solution. What we want to do is relaying on our optical fiber connection as our main connection to the internet as 25/25mbit is plenty for anything other than heavy downloads, and the low ping is beneficial for about anything we do on whether it's online gaming, remote connections etc.. But at the same time we would love to be able to utilise the 120mbit download speeds from the coaxial connection when using download managers such as torrent-clients, Blizzard downloader etc.. Would it be possible to achieve all this simply by replacing our Cisco RV 220W Small Business routers with something like the Cisco RV042G or setting up a pfSense firewall / router with Dual / Multi-WAN setup?

 

[tipstir]

TL-ER5120 router handles 4x WAN connections. You can load balance or you can set them up for fallback if one goes out the others kick in. TL-ER6120 only does 2x WAN. But I am sure the CISCO will handle those connections but the question how's the number of connections does it support. Where as the TL-ER5120 supports up to 120,000 session connections per 30,000 per WAN ports so there are 4 x 30,000 = 120,000 were as the TL-ER6120 supports 2 x 30,000 = 60,000