Hello all. I have prospective clients for whom their home data network is very important - they're hedge fund managers that occasionally work from home. They've indicated that they must have both DSL and a cable modem, such that if one goes down, they can keep rolling.

My background is actually in enterprise telecom, but it's been a long while. Any idea of products or approaches for this? I'd prefer to steer clear of corporate gear (Cisco, etc.), but if that's what it takes, so be it. Ideally, it would be a router that would allow connecting two broadband feeds, with the ability to define one as primary, with some sort of fallover to the other broadband feed if the primary fails.

Am I dreaming? Anyone tackled this for a residence?

And yes, this is also posted at IP, in the verified section

Ironicly I was just looking on Linksys' website at some VPN stuff and saw this model. model #: RV042 under business section. It is also available in 8 and 16 port configs. It has dual internet connections for redundancy/load balancing.

i'd use cisco stuff...not linksys

Cisco 1800 dual WAN plus analog phone modem backup (very nice feature)
Xincom XC-DPG603 dual WAN
Xincom XC-DPG602 dual WAN
Xincom XC-DPG503 dual WAN
Xincom XC-DPG502 dual WAN
Linksys RV016 configureable WAN ports for super redundancy, but poor load balancing
Linksys RV082 dual WAN
Planet XRT-402D dual WAN

Bam!

ok i have a question for someone smarter than me, ok low threshold but seriuosly...

can you take 3 cisco 1800 to have 4 internet connections?

first cisco 1800 say 1 for dsl, 1 for cable 2nd cisco 1800 1 for sat internet and 1 for t1 or fiber

the 3 rd would combine all 4 modems


just wondering if it can be done

ed

This certainly can be done, but with a whole boatloads of caveats that I'm simply not prepared to answer. Cisco networks are handled by an associate of mine. The last time we did a 4 WAN feed network, I think that they either used 4 individual PIX style security appliances or a couple of Xircom pieces w/ much of the routing simply passed through to a large Cisco carrier class router.

I plug and play and do a bit of web management on my own stuff, but am lost when it comes to more advanced situations. The Linksys RV016 is capable of supporting 8 WAN ports, I believe, where the ports are configureable within the webserver as to their up/down implementation

From what I can glean, the complicated part comes into play when you use multiple WANs and manage load balancing AND the ability to establish secure connections between LAN clients and a secure WAN host. i.e. the ability to write rules for such negotiation and either force single WAN port access for the rest of the session (likely) or write global rules that are applied to all WAN ports? (less likely, and also potentially defeating some security measures?) Using a manged switch, trunking off a few VLANS with dedicated WAN ports is one thing, but to provide anything above 2 WAN ports for a single LAN is beyong me, something I'm curious about, but also something I will probably never really need to know an answer to.