Two ISPs in two rooms

[Simon Greenwood]

Hello -

Came across this forum while looking for a new router for the house (got an Asus RT-AC68U and I'm very pleased with it) and would like to throw this out:

I work from home and have just moved house. As we have Virgin for TV we went with their Big Kahuna deal which of course includes fast broadband. I previously had PlusNet fibre and decided to keep it too (well, it was that or pay off the contract, which as a Yorkshireman I was very reluctant to do). So I have two ISPs, which is handy for work. It's also useful for me to have a fixed IP which I have with PlusNet.
What I would like to do with this setup is a combination of load balancing, routing and traffic shaping so that work traffic can go across the PlusNet connection, other traffic can be load balanced and have some kind of redundancy for when the Virgin connection struggles. This is all well and good in principle, but it's made slightly more difficult by both connections terminating in different rooms with the only available connection either over wifi or ethernet over power. I might be able to put ethernet in eventually but not just now.
The Virgin Superrouter seems to be decent piece of kit for what it is and I currently have it running in modem mode with the RT-AC68U attached. The PlusNet connection is through the usual Technicolor TG582, which is, shall we say, less good that it should be.
My feeling at the moment is to move the Asus to the PlusNet connection and switch the Superrouter back to router mode with the Asus as the main router and WPS master and connect them over ethernet over power. However I assume that the dual WAN function on the Asus won't work over EoP so I will need some kind of smart routing which may or may not be beyond the Merlin firmware. What sort of capability is possible with this setup?

 

[System Error Message]

all virgin media routers are horrible. You can use your AC68U for both ISPs but you can use selective load balancing. Using RMerlin's firmware you can achieve selective load balancing where you want some clients with 1 ISP and the rest with another.

 

[coxhaus]

I think it would be easier and cheaper to move one of the terminations to where they are together so you can use both with one router. The other solution would be to manually split devices across both connections. You can research dual homed internet connections but I don't think you will be able to do it with consumer routers. You can look at the Edgerouter light as I think it will do BGP routing but I am not sure of their capability. The configuration is going to be advanced probably CLI mode.

 

[Simon Greenwood]

I think it would be easier and cheaper to move one of the terminations to where they are together so you can use both with one router. The other solution would be to manually split devices across both connections.

I tried asking the BT engineer to install the point near the Virgin point but he wouldn't run cable over or around the house. I can remember when BT engineers were able to run cable anywhere to put a connection where you wanted it but not, it seems any more.
It looks like manual routing is my only option.

 

[coxhaus]

Any way you can route the connection through your attic so they end up at together? Houses should have a DMAC like a business where outside connections come into. That way you would not end up with one company installing on this end of the house and the other company installing on the other end of the house.

 

[PolarBear]

My mother's overhead phone line was giving problems recently. BT said the cable was still the original from 50 years ago, and they offered to replace it.

However, they also told her that due to Health and Safety Regulations, they are no longer allowed to climb up a ladder to attach the new line to the chimney stack, where the old one attached to the house. The house is only on one level, by the way.

Personally, I find this is a bit ridiculous. Surely climbing ladders is part of a linesman's job description ?

Instead, BT hung the cable low over the neighbour's garden (fortunately, he did not complain), and came into the opposite end of the house.

So although it's great to have all services coming into the house at more-or-less the same place, it seems it's not always possible.

 

[Simon Greenwood]

Probably not, really, but it's a very good idea. I suppose it's not a very common requirement even if a lot of people have a cable point and a phone point in their houses. It's also not a modern house (built in the mid-1920s) and the walls are stone so there aren't any internal cable routes except under the floors.

I'm slowly formulating what options I have and I'm leaning towards a combination of manual routing and bridging which I assume can be done in one way or another with the AC68.

 

[coxhaus]

Normally if you need to share a printer on different networks or IP VLANs or such setup the printer with an IP address and enable routing between networks. If you want to restrict access then you use an ACL access control list to restrict access. If you setup VLANs make sure you assign an IP network to the VLANs. It makes it simpler in the long run to manage.

Do not try to run DHCP from both routers on the same network. You will not end up with what you think. A DHCP is a non-directed broadcast on a network. There is no control over the DHCP broadcast.

 

[System Error Message]

From the way i see this, you have 2 router/modems and 1 asus router. Use both modems as bridges and the asus router as the router for both and use selective routing with RMerlin's firmware. This will let you share LAN resources and also have the office internet seperate from home. You can use DHCP binding so you wont have to worry about static configs or worrying about the same device getting different IP and than use the firewall to route some IPs through office internet and rest through home internet.

If you want 2 seperate networks on the same wire than you're looking at vlans or even layer 3 segmentation. BT uses DSL whereas virgin media uses the old coaxial tv cable. Both ISPs give crappy routers that only work without issues in bridge mode. Make sure to check whether BT uses PPPOA. I've seen many who use virgin media and the majority of the complaints are caused by their crappy router regardless of how fast the hardware they put in it it will perform poorly. Vlans are complicated to do on a consumer router but it is doable.

 

[Simon Greenwood]

Yeah, working out a VLAN config seems to be the way. The Asus is the AP and DHCP provider (turned it off on the Plusnet router and I'm sure it's going to be possible on the Virgin one somehow) so I'll work something out.

 

[coxhaus]

Using one DHCP server will require you to manually configure the default gateways on the clients for the other router. However you want to manually control routing between the 2 ISPs will only require you to change the default gateway to use the other router for internet access. This will pretty much work in all instances whether different networks or not and using VLANs or not.

PS
DNS will need to be changed also if you are using local ISP's DNS servers. You need to point to the appropriate ISP DNS server. If you use a local DNS or other outside DNS like google, openDNS, etc. then the DNS will not need to be changed.