When will people take Dual Wan more seriously?

[bmn1]

At our house we have 2 internet connections, we've setup the 2nd one as a backup after hearing from a friend of ours that did the same.

The reason that more homes, small offices and companies are ever more often getting a 2nd internet connection is that internet is ever more a part of our lives.

More and more in our society have come to depend on the internet, so it's only natural that we seek assurances that it will be always available. It's a matter of availability.

For others it's a matter of speed. Turns outs combining 2 or more connections is the easiest way to get a faster connection instead of waiting for years until your provider decides to upgrade it's network.

But we stumble on our routers limitations. I have.

I'm currently using an Asus RT-N16, it's great machine, it's stable and it's powerful.

But it can't do dual-wan, or barely can with the help of this also great firmware and mod wrt-merlin.

I have got it to do dual-wan, but it's limited to the "fail-over" mode. Meaning that you can get higher availability by adding a 2nd connection.

But the "load-balance" mode doesn't work, so you can't combine the 2 connections to get more performance.

When I set it up as load-balance I got the same behavior as on fail-over. That is only 1 wan would be used at a time.

But even the fail-over mode isn't perfect. Ideally I'd like the router to detect a failing wan and switch to a healthy one more quickly, currently it takes a while and you might get a few failed connections before the internet is reestablished.

I'd also like it to keep an eye on the first connection and when it's back up, immediately switch back to it. That's currently not possible, the router do the switch and never look back. Perhaps it will return back if the 2nd connection fails, but I haven't tested that.

I have also found another firmware that works on my Asus RT-N16 and does dual wan with good feedback on the forums, that's Tomato DualWan (dualwan.cn).

Here the problem is different. The source code has been kept close and there are reports that it contains malware that could compromise your privacy and security, for example silently collecting your passwords and submitting it to someone in China. Or worse, such as DNS hijacking of your bank's website.

This defeats the whole point. If we can't get safe and realiable internet, then a router's firmware is useless.

So I'm still looking for a way to get good and cost effective dual wan for my home network.

I've heard DrayTek has good routers for that, anybody tried?

If you have more info on dua wan or (multiple wan) please share, I'm eager to learn and to get a solution for this.

 

[thiggins]

Plenty of real dual WAN routers out there. Cisco RV0XX series is popular. The TP-LINK TL-ER6020 also gets good reports.

 

[Nerre]

True load balancing requires support in both ends of the line.

What you can get with just a router is that some of the clients on your LAN will use one WAN and other clients will use the other WAN.

That's probably why you think it doesn't work: You are only testing from one computer.


As for the fail-over quirks, how do you suggest it should work? How should the router detect that one WAN is down?

Try to ping a host?

In that case, if the host goes down your WAN will change, even if it's still working...

Try to ping a few hosts? Might work, but how often can you ping them without being considered abusive? And without filling your connection with connection tests...

I've installed Nagios on the router to monitor the availability, and had to ask myself questions like the ones above to set up working tests.

 

[RMerlin]

Personally I use the Linksys RV042 for a customer with two Internet connection, configured in failover mode. Works great.

 

[PrivateJoker]

The 30-90min a year my 60/10MB connection goes down (which is fast enough that I don't need to supplement it with anything), I can use my iPhone to make an LTE wifi hotspot w/ WPA (unjailbroken, and already including in my plan) with 20/5MB speed.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
As a home owner, we don't have any mission critical anything on home network. Any how I don't recall any down time due to cable system outage in years. Even total power outage time in last 40 years is mere less than 1 hour. But I keep two routers, one as a back up.

 

[Nerre]

When we had ADSL (we have fiber now) our ADSL would go down each time it rained. Bad cable joints somewhere probably, but it was impossible to get it fixed because it came up again in 1-2 minutes so the operator never saw the fault. But it dropped over and over, like 8-10 times an hour...

I would have loved to have failover to 3G at that time.

It's a big difference if you live in an apartment in the city with fiber or if you live in the countryside with ADSL on overhead cables.

 

[GoNz0]

It is so rare for a consumer level router to offer this but ASUS did us proud.

Still some bugs but you normally add a zero to the end of the price tag or go for WRT 3rd party firmwares to allow this.

 

[mikeg]

I would be really happy if Asus had an updated list of 3G/4G units which worked for each of their routers. I have in mind to get a 4G equipment to use as backup for my fiber 100/100 Mpbs connection. Even consumers will need the backup possibility because of the more and increasing need to be online.

It is so rare for a consumer level router to offer this but ASUS did us proud.

Still some bugs but you normally add a zero to the end of the price tag or go for WRT 3rd party firmwares to allow this.