I have had both cable modem and DSL now for a long time and intend to keep both. I do so much work from home – that I cannot afford the 2-3% outage that my cable modem seems to have. So I added the second cheapest DSL from ATT as a backup. It does give me free ATT WiFi in a few airports for free.
Up til now, I have been just going downstairs and switching cables when one r the other service went down – or just used the slower DSL all the time.
But thanks to Bryan Holland I found a LinkSys RV042 router that does a dual network connection for the home.
It installs pretty easily. Initially it only uses one link and uses the other as backup. SO I switched it to load balancing – this was very cool – except little things did not work. Mostly YouTube messes up – my guess is that it gets two IPs on successive requests and decides a session has been stolen and zaps you :( My guess is that hyper sensitive software will do the same.
So I go back to the failover mode by default – at least my family does not have to switch the wires while I am traveling. It is simple enough to switch back and forth.
If I am going to do a lot of uploads or downloads, I temporarily turn on load balancing and then turn it back off when my need for bandwidth is back to normal.
It was pretty reasonably priced.
Review: LinkSys RV042
P.S. I typed this entire post waiting for my fresh checkout of Sakai’s trunk to recompile. Actually while waiting for the compile – I went to get a cup of coffee, talked to my daughter for a few minutes – and *then* typed this blog post. Well – got to run – the compile is *almost* done – it is compiling sakai-reset-pass