One Router, Two ISPs

[PS3EdOlkkola]

I've been searching for a router that would allow my systems to use a backup ISP if my main Internet connection went down. I've got two ISPs, Time Warner Cable (100mb down/10mb up) and ATT Uverse (24mb down/2mb up).

In what averages about once every couple of months, one or the other ISP service will go down. Of course, they never give a heads-up when it's about to happen. The outage lasts anywhere between a couple of hours to a couple of days. When the primary (TWC) ISP goes down, I reconfigure all folding rigs with an IP address that complies with the Uverse IP address range. It's a double-hassle changing IP addresses to the backup ISP, then back to the primary ISP. And in typical fashion, just as I'd get everything reconfigured to the backup ISP, the primary ISP comes back online. So, I have been looking for a router that has two WAN ports and would automagically switch from the primary ISP to the secondary ISP (and back again) without needing to perform any IP configuration changes on my folding rigs.

The router I found that fits the bill is the Cisco RV320, for only $132 on Amazon. I installed it this weekend, and damn, if it doesn't actually do exactly what it says it will do! After upgrading the firmware and configuring it with both ISPs (Uverse has to run in DMZPlus mode to connect to the Cisco), I unplugged the cable to the TWC modem, and BAM it immediately switched to the Uverse connection. Plugged the TWC cable back in and BAM, right back to the TWC connection I was looking at the FAH Control app monitoring all 14 rigs and not one monitored rig flipped from green "Online" to orange "Connecting" on the test. I hooked my old Apple Airport Extreme router into one of the Cisco's LAN ports and configured the Airport to run in bridge mode, so I can service my all my wifi gear. In any case, I thought this was a pretty slick product for anyone with a couple of ISPs looking for a backup/failover solution.

[toTOW]

I know exactly what you're looking for (OverTheBox), but I'm afraid the offer is not available outside France ... Maybe you can try to contact them to get more information about this ?

This kind of router is also popular among people who need to aggregate multiple connection (LTE + xDSL for instance) ... you can also do something with alternative firmwares like Tomato on supported hardware ...

In the example here (French forum), he has 3 LTE modems (and a 4th is ready) plus 2 ADSL lines.

[JimboPalmer]

I have had good luck with the RV series routers: RV042, RV082, RV320, and RV325. I mostly buy on ebay, but the idea is the same.

RV0xx is 100 meg, RV3xx is gig. If you are crazy, there is an RV016 that can connect to as many as 7 ISPs.

[ChristianVirtual]

With a little dedicated low-energy system available I would suggest my default proposal: https://www.pfsense.org

https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN

It's a phantastic FreeBSD based router solution. I run as VM machine from my "main server" (Xeon 1240v2); these days i would opt for a dedicated system (e.g Xeon D or other low energy CPUs.) comes also with build-in IPSec/VPN and lots other capabilities. A bit more work to setup first time but worth the learning.

[davidcoton]

I've been searching for a router that would allow my systems to use a backup ISP if my main Internet connection went down. I've got two ISPs, Time Warner Cable (100mb down/10mb up) and ATT Uverse (24mb down/2mb up)...

I was looking at the FAH Control app monitoring all 14 rigs and not one monitored rig flipped from green "Online" to orange "Connecting" on the test...

The FAHControl indicator only monitors the connection from the PC running FAHControl to each Client. The network connection to the outside world is not monitored. An interruption to the upstream internet should not disrupt local comms, so this result is entirely expected. The more interesting question is, will a FAH download/upload interrupted by a similar test recover, or will it hang?

[PS3EdOlkkola]

The PC running FAH Control (and HFM, VNC and other tools on a 28" 4K display so it all fits on one) monitors 7 rigs in one location and 7 in another physically separate location (appx 8 miles away) over the internet. I have tagged an identifying prefix to the FAH Control Client Names so I know which are remote and which are local. Given the polling interval on 7 remote systems, (which seems to be between 10k to 20k bps) there is a decent chance at least one of the clients would flip to "Connecting", even if just briefly, but they didn't when disconnecting the primary WAN and reconnecting it after the secondary WAN picked up the slack. I also tested it by streaming music (Pandora), youtube videos and netflix -- no stuttering or buffering. For $132 it's the best piece of networking gear I've ever purchased.

Good suggestion to try "pulling the plug" when uploading a work unit to see if it can manage through that -- I'll try it and report back.

[Kebast]

I've actually got one of these, but I've never used the dual WAN option:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/r ... index.html

[davidcoton]

The PC running FAH Control (and HFM, VNC and other tools on a 28" 4K display so it all fits on one) monitors 7 rigs in one location and 7 in another physically separate location (appx 8 miles away) over the internet.

Ahh, okay, that makes sense now. I take it the remote location doesn't have the same problem with losing an ISP?

MY UK ISP has been very reliable, but since I only have one phone line, I don't think hot swapping would be an option anyway (AIUI, you can only have one ISP connection per phone line).

[bruce]

I don't know about the UK, but in the USA, the phone companies wire two or more lines to each location, even if you only pay for one. You can get the second line provisioned for DSL even if the voice band doesn't have a dial tone ... but they'll strongly resist doing so.

It's probably not as useful as a tru redundant connection because the two copper pairs have too high a percentage of common-mode-failures and they probably connect to the same primary router at the Central Office, even if you have different ISPs.