Bonded DSL Router

Hi all,

My Dad's on the verge of saying goodbye to NTL after a 3rd total outage of web and phone this morning, which is the 3rd in 2 months. It may not sound much, but he is a homeworker and so needs as reliable a line as possible. I have always liked the idea of bonded dsl, but we do not have the space for an extra PC to act as a bondsystem/router. I've been looking around, but am confused as to what routers there are for this situation. I've seen the load balancing routers, but am really looking for one that will bond two lines together. Is there such a router? I've been looking at the draytek routers, but am not sure which one fits the bill.

Thanks,

Karl

This thread may help

Hmm...Interesting, guys, thanks I've been thinking now that a Load Balanced pair of lines may be cheaper to provide a router for? It also seems more efficient too, because on a Saturday my Dad streams a lot of video, which can bring our line to a crawl, or cause him to buffer if I fire up a game. Now I think about it, if we were to load balance 2 lines, could I basically configure the router to send the bandwidth of one line to his (Static IP'd) laptop and PC, and have one to the other systems in the house (Server, mine, mum's and sister's)? Does it also require a balancing system at the ISP's side? Or can this be done with 2 lines from one company regardless?

Edited by DogsiWoo (Thu 26-Oct-06 15:17:34)

I am not so sure that you need to bond two lines together for your requirements, which seem to put the emphasis on availability rather than speed.

If you have the luxury of having cable available to you, then you have an excellent solution for fault tolerant Internet availability. Use the cable together with one ADSL phone line, from a good ISP.

You can configure the PCs, each to use a specified router fror preferance with fallback to the other connection in case of a fault. It may need a little manual help to reconfigure with some specific faults, but the overall availability will be second to none (and you and your Dad can normally use different connections and so not interfere with each other.

a decent router (or even a windows PC) can send traffic to certain IPs or to certain ports via a designated route. With two routers on one LAN you can use the default gateway settings to route traffic by default to one or the other.