Thread: Easiest way to take advantage of multiple internet connections?

Originally Posted by alonmg

well i got a Cisco RV042 for very cheap. Costs as much as most quality routers ~$200 That would honestly be your best option of the bunch

Hmm, well I'm kinda interested now, but could I still make that solution work if one was wifi? Both connections are the exact same isp/plan/speed but one is my personal connection and one the free wifi

plug a wireless router behind the cisco... I do it for the office to create a fail over connection with a 10Mb/s up/down airband and 35Mb/s down 5Mb/s up Time Warner Business Class. It can do load balancing as well, we just wanted redundancy more. I have 5 wireless networks and 70 desktops, 4 servers, 4 wireless routers, 20 printers, and 12 laptops behind all of them. And a few 24 port switches, and 2 24 port PoE switches for our 30 VoIP phones. Just set a static address to the wireless router itself. and if you use DHCP make the range higher or lower than your devices. If you are wondering the multiple networks, one is dual band running DD-WRT

Originally Posted by alonmg

plug a wireless router behind the cisco... I do it for the office to create a fail over connection with a 10Mb/s up/down airband and 35Mb/s down 5Mb/s up Time Warner Business Class. It can do load balancing as well, we just wanted redundancy more. I have 5 wireless networks and 70 desktops, 4 servers, 4 wireless routers, 20 printers, and 12 laptops behind all of them. And a few 24 port switches, and 2 24 port PoE switches for our 30 VoIP phones. Just set a static address to the wireless router itself. and if you use DHCP make the range higher or lower than your devices. If you are wondering the multiple networks, one is dual band running DD-WRT

Ah I see, well since your an expert maybe you can evaluate this for me too haha,

Dual-WAN for simple round-robin load equalization - DD-WRT Wiki

If I'm reading that right, you should be able to set any DD-WRT router to use dual wan and load balancing, but making the fourth port a 2nd wan?

I thought about going and doing that route, but ended up being a little too troublesome even for me. and the bad part was, when it went down, I was the only one that could fix it. Thats why I went with the cisco, because when it went down one time, their customer support was excellent, because I was on vacation when it went down, and the other IT guy isn't as adept to technologies as much as he is still newer in the field. Went so far as to remotely login to the router for him and figure out what was wrong and fixed it for him. If you want to make a custom dual/multi wan router. DD-WRT is not a good route honestly. zero shell, untangled, and the new pfsense Operating Systems are. pfsense is based on Free BSD. The added bonus of having an actual router built/designed for multi wan that in a load balancing situation if one goes down, the other connection is bad as well as it splits the data. So you can easily switch to the connection that isn't down by logging in and flipping a switch.

Configuring two wireless routers with one SSID (network name) at home for free roaming - Scott Hanselman

i don't know if plugin your isp wan to the second (slave) wireless router could result in a bonded connection or some sort of load balance ..

load balancing over wifi is dicey at best. Wired solutions are always solid. However you can opt for two wireless routers with DD-WRT turn them into a bridge, plug in a dual wan router and load balance.

OCTOPUS+
some people claim that this software works!

Getting back to the original question, there isn't an "easy" way to do what you want, especially when wifi is involved and particularly when both a wired and wireless connections are involved.