Best Dual WAN for Cable + DSL?

[RinkyDinkville]

I want to setup cable and DSL because the fastest I can get either is 10mbit here. What would be the best router? I want to optimize downloads, gameplay, and video streaming.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

"Best" router? Want to build one? How big is your budget?

Or just a good suggestion for a home user with a home user budget and not an enterprise company budget? Because some answers to "Best dual WAN router" can give you sticker shock with some high end devices in the tens of thousands of dollar ranges.

Honestly I'd say for the home user, grab a nice little small form factor x86 platform with 3 NICs minimum ..and install PFSense. Some articles on that distro here on SNB.

"Off the shelf"...Peplink, Cisco RV0 small business series, Draytec, some others here. But first I'd like to encourage you to do some research on multi-WAN routers and how they work, and the pro's and con's.

For gaming...won't help you. May even cause frequent disconnects as your traffic hops WAN ports due to weird load balancing and breaks your sessions and bonks you out of the online game.

For downloading...they'll be session based also, utilize only one of the two WAN connections at a time. Hmmm..yeah, same with video streaming usually.

For a single computer, or two, or three...multi WAN routers really don't help you. They do help out larger networks that have lots of traffic loads....because it can distribute those loads across the WAN ports.

But say you have a 10 meg cable pipe and a 6 meg DSL pipe...you aren't going to sit down at a single computer and realize a 16 meg connection. Nope. Goes back to sessions.

 

[claykin]

YeOldeStonecat is 100% correct. Make that 105%.

Assuming you understand the limitations of a dual WAN routers (that it doesn't BOND connections) I'll highly recommend a Zyxel USG50 or USG100 (for SOHO) or USG200 for SMB.

 

[stevech]

I want to setup cable and DSL because the fastest I can get either is 10mbit here. What would be the best router? I want to optimize downloads, gameplay, and video streaming.

Time Warner and Cox cable provide 15-20Mbps downlink speeds. Is your limitation because of a different locale?

Also bear in mind that, IMO, virtually none (or very few) Internet hosts will give you a sustained transfer rate of 10Mbps or more. Costs them too much.

 

[RinkyDinkville]

Time Warner and Cox cable provide 15-20Mbps downlink speeds. Is your limitation because of a different locale?

Also bear in mind that, IMO, virtually none (or very few) Internet hosts will give you a sustained transfer rate of 10Mbps or more. Costs them too much.

TW is limited to 10M "turbo" here as is DSL.

I am aware that I am not bonding the connections together. I want something reasonable that will scale to eventual 100Mbit speeds (supposedly fiber backhaul is near complete for both the ISPs as well as Verizon LTE.) Basically I want to push my garbage traffic off on one connection (downloads/source syncs/etc...) and still have a usable skype/gaming/browsing connection along with failover support. Someone also mentioned RouterBoards running RouteOS? Seems similar to PFSense but in a low power, low cost ($60 shipped) solution.

 

[RinkyDinkville]

Also any thoughts on the SRX5308 from Netgear?

Also which of these solutions allow me to set a default WAN for a protocol, but in the case of a failure on that WAN send traffic to the other WAN port?

 

[zowitz]

Hey guys,

I've been doing some research and you actually can combine multiple Internet lines (eg including a cable modem) to make a faster and more reliable one. The Internet lines can be different technologies and can come from different providers, and it is not necessary to have special software (e.g. MLPPP) or hardware at the provider premises - they don't even have to know you are bonding their line to another (it is done at layer 4).

For example, you could bond together four ADSL lines at 6Mbps down/ 768k up to create a 24Mbps down/ 3Mbps up connection, even for a single file transfer or a streaming video source. This is a lot cheaper than a bonded T1 line.

I'm sure if you google search for "broadband bonding" you'll find what you're looking for.

Hope this helps your search.

 

[Dennis Wood]

If you use BitTorrent or similar a lot, pfsense (with dual wan build) does definitely aggregate both WAN connections and in my tests is capable of "saturating" both pipes. It's the one example I've found where both pipes are truly aggregating. The older Draytek 2950s I was testing previously did not perform anywhere close to the new pfsense boxes, therefore don't assume all dual wan routers will behave the same.

The real advantage of dual wan in production really is the ability to direct traffic in ways that make sense for your clients based on the capabilities of your connections. An example would be that you want max upload speed for FTP traffic, which normally would seriously compromise a single asynchronous connection. However if you direct FTP to pipe 2 while web users are on pipe 1, then everyone is happy. That is typically where you see performance gains, with the exception of BitTorrent and specifically pFsense.