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Dual WAN - Looking for recommendations (UK)

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brbbX

New Around Here
Hi everyone,

I already have an Orbi Mesh with RBR50 and 3 Satellites which I'm planning to keep using.
I currently have FTTC 76mbps internet, but in January I will be able to get a new provider with 500mbps (potentially going up to 1gbps in the near future).

I'm hoping to get a device that I could connect both WANs to, then connect said device to the Orbi Router. I'm thinking probably for load-balancing but might use it as fallback instead.

I've read that the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter can do that out of the box, but given the speeds, I'm not sure the ER-X would be enough, or if I would have to get the ER-4 which is much more expensive?

Any other recommendations?

Thank you!
 
Failover can be done on a lot of modern routers, but I guess it doesn't make sense to waste money on another device with built in WiFi.
Even the EdgeRouter Lite should do the job in terms of throughput, so I don't think you have to worry about the more expensive model.
Sadly it seems the Lite doesn't do dual WAN.

It looks like the ER-X runs on a Mediatek MT7621AT, which is a dual core MIPS SoC at 880MHz, found in a lot of low-end routers...
The ER-4 uses a quad core Cavium (now Marvell) 1GHz MIPS chip and the Lite on a dual core 500MHz Cavium MIPS SoC.
So none of them are exactly cutting edge, but then again, MIPS CPU cores are good at routing, even compared to more modern Arm based CPU cores.
 
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I think by keeping the other router system in the system you will have problems active load balancing. The real traffic will be in a different network than the network you want to load balance. It will work but you will need to deal with the different networks.

You can add the Cisco RV340 router to your list for load balancing. It may have a limit on the amount of traffic it can deal with but it is cheap.
 
Thank you, so are you saying that load balancing wouldn't work very well if I used the orbi with its own network?
Maybe I should just forget this idea of having dual WAN, I thought it would be easier
 
Or would the orbi still work well if I used it in AP mode, and used the ER-4 as the main router? Or it wouldn't make a difference?
 
Or would the orbi still work well if I used it in AP mode, and used the ER-4 as the main router? Or it wouldn't make a difference?
That should apparently work quite well, someone else here is doing something very similar.
 

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