Thanks @ohit,

Because it's difficult to work out which MikroTek router devices support dual WAN (all of them??) I'm also having a look at the Draytek options. Thanks for sharing your experience!

I see Dratek have WiFi 6 and mesh options, otherwise, I'd get a wired router and add that separately.

In reply to a post by busywait:

Because it's difficult to work out which MikroTek router devices support dual WAN (all of them??) I'm also having a look at the Draytek options.

All of them - the different models have differing numbers of ethernet (fast or gigabit) and wireless (2.4 and/or 5GHz) interfaces, and various CPU with a range of performance.

None of them have inbuilt modems, and the wireless performance lags other manufacturers - I typically use Mikrotiks for routing/firewalling/VPN/NAT/DHCP, etc., Vigor 130 modems for VDSL2 (previously Vigor 120 v2 for ADSL), and UniFi APs for wireless.

They do have a basic configuration to act as a typical home router, beyond that it is a case of crafting something to mark and route traffic as required for load sharing. There are examples using PCC (per connection classifier) in the Mikrotik help pages / wiki, and there is a good user forum.

I do like Draytek devices but over the last few years find the web UI hides just a little too much, and have never been a fan of the binary config file which makes it impossible to compare changes - it is possible to export a text version of Mikrotik configurations which makes comparisons possible.

Sorry to barge in on another thread, but I've been trying to make a broadband connection using a vigor 130 without success. It just doesn't seem to want to work, and I can't find the device on the local network. Any advice would be very welcome.

In reply to a post by busywait:

Thanks @ohit,

Because it's difficult to work out which MikroTek router devices support dual WAN (all of them??) I'm also having a look at the Draytek options. Thanks for sharing your experience!

I see Dratek have WiFi 6 and mesh options, otherwise, I'd get a wired router and add that separately.

No offence, but if you’re struggling to ID the MikroTik’s from that perspective, you will struggle getting them correctly configured with dual WAN support.

Although they are good device and RouterOS is the Swiss Army knife of networking, the learning curve can be steep and they aren’t necessarily intuitive or out of box ready, especially in such a config. If you’re prepared to learn then they are very good indeed.

I have two internet connection at my house - VDSL (Vodafone) and 4G (Also Vodafone, recently switched from 3).

Due to my rural connection, the VDSL only gets 15mbps down 1mbps up, where the 4G is 40mbps down and 10mbps up.

I would dump the VDSL, but the 4G really struggles with multiple connections (internet hungry family). So the 4G is used for large downloads and streaming (Netflix 4K etc), and the VDSL is for gaming and general browsing, where less data but lower latency is needed. Both connections work out to about £50 per month in total, which is less than BT were charging us for broadband only until last year.

I was running them as two completely separate networks until recently, using the ISP provided VDSL router and a Huawei b525 (plus some wifi AP's). This was o, but did cause a bit of confusion at tine when people swapped between networks - "dad, the printer won't work again!!!" etc etc.

I now have an Asus AX88u router that supports dual WAN. I have also got a Draytek 130 Modem, but still using the 525 for 4G (double NAT, but so far not caused any issues). Both connected to the Asus in a load balancing config.

The good thing about the Asus is that I can set certain devices to only use one specified WAN connection. So data heavy devices (Nest cams, smart TV's, etc) only use 4G and gaming PC used VDSL (for better ping etc). Thing like smart phones just left to use whatever the router decides at the time.

It was actually surprisingly simple to set up, I'm and by no means an expert (things like port forwarding and subnets still confuse me at time) - you just add the IP address to a 'rules' list, and chose primary or secondary WAN. It's also important have static/manual IP's, but that's also very simple.

It's great to finally have one single unified network. All devices talk to each other, but I can chose which internet connection that use. So far, it's working well (touch wood).

* The only downside so far is that the Vigor 130 is slower on the download than the stock VF Wifi hub (15mbps vs 20 mbps), which is otherwise pretty mediocre. I have tried tweaking the SNR settings on the 130, but that results in frequent disconnects. I don't know why the VF hub is so much better (unless the speed will adjust with time). If anyone has any ideas I would love to know!

Edited by deleted (Mon 05-Apr-21 10:53:32)

Sounds good. I’d recommend you also set the router to use third party (e.g Google) DNS servers rather than ISP provided DNS servers in your setup. Can help to avoid issues when you have a multi WAN setup.

I can’t pass on specific thoughts on the Drayek vs Vodafone modem DL slowdown - may possibly be due to a (more favourable) chipset difference.

Thanks, I’m actually running PiHole (and Homebridge) and a raspberry pi, with a pass through to Google DNS. This really helps our connection with PC gaming, as otherwise things like Amazon Echos are constantly accessing the internet for no good reason (to me).

I've been doing this for a number of years. Initially with a 10mbit Virgin Connection and 6mbit DSL years ago (think 2011 or earlier) with a Draytek.

As the WAN speed increased though the throughput of various Dual WAN routers wasn't high enough. I settled on the RV042g CIsco, which had 1Gbps WAN/LAN throughput according to small net builder. It worked for a number of years - 5 or so. One broke after a fuse tripped in my house but they're easy to source on ebay. The second seemed to be working fine, but the internet connectivity would fail randomly and a reboot didn't fix it.

I now have 1Gbps Virgin and 76Mbps Plusnet. The Draytek 2927 seemed to be the only one able to copy with future 1Gbps speeds so I went for that. They've massively improved failover connection conditions in the latest version - you can even set packet loss/ping/jitter as conditions to fail over. If you're on a busy Virgin segment that's a real benefit!

It also has really flexible options for dynmaic DNS updating and WAN routing to clients. I share the frustration that many changes require a reboot, but overall for someone who isn't interested in learning scripting languages that are a bore and have no application in the rest of my life/job it's a great option.