The TP-Link router that Mr Saffron suggested is more or less equivalent to the Draytek 2920 (without wireless). So the question is whether you need to access your network and load balance from wireless devices rather than just from wired devices. If you want to do that, then you need either (a) something equivalent to the 2920N, or (b) the TP-Link router with a separate wireless access point (operating as a bridge).

Any way around the cost will be getting towards £150, simply because load balancing routers are not cheap.

great- thanks once more!

Would this fit the bill: Tp-Link TL-ER604W SafeStream Wireless N Gigabit Broadband VPN Router?

Edited by deleted (Thu 29-Aug-13 14:05:16)

I'm not an expert but can't see why you would want load balancing between such different connections.

Virgin Connections sometimes have high jitter which can be a problem for gamers. So it may be that you would want to route a Gamer machine to use a BE gateway rather than Virgin. I have forgotten what DHCP options the two routers have but even if they are not flexible you can always use static LAN configurations on PCs to achieve this.

I can't see that you need to buy a new router unless you really want it for a specific reason. I'm currently running my Superhub in modem mode and using a virtual appliance router on my HTPC (which was always on anyway). The results are surprisingly good.

I can't speak from personal experience but it seems to meet your requirements. TP-Link are (I think) the biggest seller of residential & SME networking equipment in China, so they are not a bad bet.

Thanks for your response:
The reason I am looking for a way to switch seamlessly between the two is s very much the one you allude to - I intend to use the Be connection for online gaming, and the Virgin one for everything else (assuming it continues to behave itself )

(How easy is a virtual appliance router to configure and would it fulfil the purpose I have in mind?)

Edited by deleted (Fri 30-Aug-13 00:03:32)

I too had Be and VM at the same time. I now have VM 60Mb and BT Inf 40Mb using a Draytek 2920.

Very simple to use. I route the gaming traffic through the BT Inf (used to be Be) connection as it's far more stable latency wise. HTTP traffic & bit torrent through the VM. I have had VM for 2 years and it's quality of service is poor. But I keep it because they gave me an offer I couldn't refuse.

The 2920 also has failover so if one connection fails the other is used.

The TP Link Mr Saffron posted looks to be good as well and considerably cheaper than the Draytek. Good review on SmallNeBuilder:
Review

Good price here and I can recommend them...
Transparent

http://www.pfsense.org/ offer a free virtual appliance which runs on the free vmware player software. It is relatively easy to set up as all the router software comes pre-installed with a default config. Whilst pfsense it is designed for non experts I imagine it is still a little more complex to get working compared to a dual wan router like the tp-link. Also it is only really suitable if you have an always on PC with a spare NIC.

It would do what you want but I only suggested it as a bit of fun.

To achieve what you want I would just run with a non dhcp lan ip address and just flip the gateway manually. However my Virgin connection currently has much lower latency than any DSL connection I ever had so don't just assume it will be bad.