Choosing dual WAN router for home TP Link...

[monkeyboy76]

Dear all,

First can I say thanks to everyone who has contributed to this site, there appears to be lots of very useful information. I found your site when looking for information about dual WAN routers, and now have a host of questions I’m hoping that someone can help with.

I have a basic fiber connection, 10 Mbit up and down, through the local electricity company. Now the cable TV provider is offering a 2Mbit down/200K up connection for a one time fee for $50, which I have signed up to and plan to use as a back up connection. This is where I started to investigate dual WAN routers to either load balance across the connections, or simply fail over to the lower quality line in case of issues with the first.

The first router I found was the TP Link TL-R470T+. Slowly as I read a little more I’ve worked up through the TL-R480T+, to the TL-ER5120 and am now even thinking of the TL-ER6120!

What we have at home is very basic, a desk top PC, few laptops, NAS, a couple of printers, some smart phones. We have some music streaming systems, and I would also like to set up a video streaming system too. I have set up an Asterisk box, and mean to move the current analogue phone system over.

With all of these different applications running on the network it would be nice to be able to prioritize traffic based upon it’s type. i.e. VoIP traffic should always have priority, then skype traffic, down to things like torrents running on the NAS having a very low priority, in order to make the best use of the available bandwidth.

Reading through the TP Link router’s on line documentation, I’ve not seen is information about this kind of traffic shaping. There was information about giving priority to certain machines on the network, but that was all I could find. Am I mistaken?

Also I’d like to stream media from a few different providers (some of whom use Geo IP restrictions). Therefore, I’ve been looking at VPN solutions.

As I look at the TL-ER6120 I see they have some VPN connectivity. To my simple mind I am wondering, can I set up some VPN connections in the router so that all of the devices on my LAN get routed through the VPN, but only for a given set of sites?

Then one other thing I would like, is to enable remote VPN access into the home network. So that when out and about the laptops can still have access to resources on the home network. Iss this something that the TL-ER6120 can do well?

As I mentioned earlier, I was thinking of some of the simpler dual WAN routers. Then to achieve some of the features I wanted, I was going to set up a small Linux box.

The smaller routers only offer 100Mbit connections, and around the LAN I would prefer to have 1Gbit, which is how I got to the TL-ER5120. The for the additional features like VPN and traffic control I got to the TL-ER6120, although it is quite a lot more expensive than the TL-R470T+ I started with.

Is anyone able to make any suggestions as to the route I should be going here? Are there other devices I should be looking at instead?

Any and all advice is most welcomely received.

Thanks

 

[coxhaus]

I own a TL-ER6120 router. It is a rack mount unit with a regular power cord mounted in my rack. I have used it for a couple of months. It is very stable. Time Warner goes down but the router keeps running and when Time Warner comes back up the router just starts running without any reboots. It seems stable like my old slow Cisco RV082 router a few years ago but much faster. My main uses are its great for a router DHCP, ACLs, and logs. I use the DHCP in the router to track all my IPs and reservations in one location so I just log on to the router to figure out my 20 or so IP addresses. I really like Microsoft’s DHCP server best but when I retired and switched to Home Server 2011 it does not seem to have DHCP so I use a router now. DHCP in some routers is poorly implemented and does not track static IP addresses very well. I need descriptions not just IP and MAC addresses.
I do not use VPN on my network. There is no reason for me to. VPN just opens an encrypted pipe into your network from somewhere else. I do not use QOS as in the past it slowed things down with other routers and firewalls. I might consider it if I had IP phones inside my network. My phone is with Time Warner and plugs into my phone wiring outside of my network. Time Warner manages my phones. I stream HD video without problems into network to my TV while we use the internet at the same time with no slowdowns. I hope this helps. I don’t know what the best router would be.

 

[monkeyboy76]

Hi coxhaus,

Thanks for the response. Reading on few other forums, and it looks like it will not be possible to set up the network to network vpn that I was thinking of, so will probably need to resort to having something like a DreamPlug [1] to route all network traffic through, maybe even set up a squid caching proxy [2].

I guess now all I really just want to do it set up a way to fail over the the network connection should it fail. Therefore, I’m thinking of going with the TL-R480T+.

Thanks


[1] http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.aspx
[2] http://www.squid-cache.org/