Freezone
join:2000-09-29
Southfield, MI
| reply to pende_tim
Re: Best Dual Wan Router
I looked at the router you linked to and i do not see mention of through-put. In a world with 60 mbs fios this will become more and more important. At $250 I am willing to bet it is not able to handle a total throughput of over 20 mbs. So someone with fios or connections with high speeds will actually slow down. To that i say "Yuck."
Through-put is one huge advantage of software routers. |
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Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS | I have heard of 30Fios, is 60 on the horizon?? |
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broccoli
join:2007-11-29
Portland, OR
| reply to Freezone
said by Freezone  :I looked at the router you linked to and i do not see mention of through-put. In a world with 60 mbs fios this will become more and more important. At $250 I am willing to bet it is not able to handle a total throughput of over 20 mbs. So someone with fios or connections with high speeds will actually slow down. To that i say "Yuck." The 2910 series maxes out at around 30 Mbit/s.
The new 2930 series can supposedly handle up to 90 MBit/s.
Through-put is one huge advantage of software routers.
Yes, but...
Before I got my 2910, I was looking at SmoothWall, after Linksys, D-Link, Buffalo, Netgear, and US Robotics products repeatedly disappointed me. I was hoping to turn an old laptop into a router, but what I discovered was it was a pain to set up, even if you have the time and energy to work on it. Hardware compatibility was poor (no native USB support, but I wanted to use USB NICs and a CardBus USB card). And no VPN functionality in the free version (for that you need to pay for licenses), and tuning it to work well is no easy task (not to mention it's easy to configure it incorrectly and compromise your network's security).
Since my telco has no plans for fiber, it would probably be another decade before my net connection outruns my router's. The router's speed is the least of my concerns at this time (well, as long as it's faster than the POS FVS114). |
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Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS | Concur, one thing to watch for is the stated specs are often the two way accumulation throughput not the one way transfer throughput. (90 becomes 45 and 30 becomes 15 for example). |
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pende_tim
Premium
join:2004-01-04
Andover, NJ
 ·ProLog
 ·ViaTalk
 ·Verizon Online DSL
| I am in the same boat as broccoli, the fastest connection offered ( at a consumer level price ) is from PTD cable. They max at 10 Mbit/sec. DSL is 3.0 Mbit from Verizon. While Verizon has a statewide franchise for FIOS, it is doubtful we will see it in Warren county in my lifetime. So the 30Mbit speed, even if it is a combined 2 way number is not a limitation for me.
My son (who is the chief network engineer for a telco in upper NY state -- proud father speaking here  ) was amazed at what this thing did. He did a quick pricing of equivalent Cisco cards - power supply, rack, WAN /LAN cards, VoIP card, wireless card and processor- to match all the features and it came in well over $5,000 even at the Telco's discount. Then one would have to spend a couple of hours stitching it all together and configuring it with MPLS.
While the two are different class devices, the value for money is excellent.
I am not meaning to sound like a fan-boy here, just letting people know what is available and relating my experience with a relatively unknown piece of gear.
Tim
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The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. |
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stevevogelnu
join:2005-03-23
Lees Summit, MO
| reply to pende_tim
Thanks Guys! I see a fan club is developing.
We're working on building up DrayTek telephone tech support and a dealer network in the USA. We're even planning an affiliate marketing program. Go to »www.draytek.us for more details.
And yes, DrayTek has a large variety of products at various performance levels, including 10/100/1000 Mbit performance. The price is generally about half or even a quarter of the price of the competition. |
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insomniac84
join:2002-01-03
Schererville, IN
| reply to Bradenton
said by Bradenton :I've purchased a new HotBrick LB-2 and a HotBrick VPN1400/2 from Gabby in Canada and the most recent firmware works very, very well. It seems that most or all of the remaining bugs have been worked out. Load-balancing (at least at the session level) works well, the dynamic DNS now works well, and the IPSec VPN works like a charm. Gabby was very helpful in the original set up. See » www.redundantinternet.com I am using the most recent firmware on an LB-2. It finally fixed the ARP problems, but now dhcp is broken. It works on some computers, but not others. And even if you initially get an address to work via DHCP, once the address expires and your computer tries to get another one it will fail. It has been over 2 years and this hotbrick still sucks. It's sad when a company releases an update to fix one problem and creates another. |
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Freezone
join:2000-09-29
Southfield, MI
| reply to Anav
said by Anav :I have heard of 30Fios, is 60 on the horizon?? 2x 30 mbit would yeild 60 and not too many lowend routers could handle that. in the next couple of years it is not unreasonable to believe that 15-30 mbit connections will be much more common and that many of these dualwan routers will make for very nice paper wieghts and door stops. |
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twizlar
I dont think so.
Premium
join:2003-12-24
Brantford, ON | reply to Huligan
Been using pfsense for this for awhile, works awesome. Throughput isn't an issue either, with three gigabit network cards.
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Intel Q6600 | 8800GTX | Ipods suck |
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Freezone
join:2000-09-29
Southfield, MI
| said by twizlar :Been using pfsense for this for awhile, works awesome. Throughput isn't an issue either, with three gigabit network cards. I am sure it is more a factor of the cpu. Which on most fairly modern comps is much faster than most low end routers. |
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phoneboy3
@telus.net | reply to Huligan
Just get a Soekris 5501, 256MB CF, and install PFSense. Your done. Probably half the cost and twice the performance of any other "commercial" grade product out there and it just works. |
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schaps
Premium
join:2004-01-15
Saint Paul, MN
1 edit | reply to Huligan
said by Huligan :
I don't need to have 1 pipe.
I need to combine 2 Modems to be on the same network.
For this I need a 2 Wan port Router. the way I'm going to set it up will be Person A will be on Modem 1 and Person B will be on Modem 2 for load balancing.
Currently we have 2 separate networks and resources can't be shared from one to another.
I think I'm going with XinCom XC-DPG502
You bowed out of this discussion rather early and never seemed to get a good answer to your question. I wonder if you got the XinCom and how it works for you. If I understand your situation, I don't know why you'd need a dual WAN router, though. It appears you just wanted a way to combine networks and have users manually load-balanced, that is, manually assigned different gateway addresses to achieve load balance. For that, you don't need a router, the Comcast business cable modems can be assigned IPs on your network's subnet, and that would work fine. However, it is advisable to get a multi-wan router so that you can then have one pipe to run through a firewall to separate your internal network from the wild wild web.
In any case, this thread contributed to my own evaluation process for upgrading my school's internet (currently have 2 T1s, will be dropping one), and I just added two Comcast business cable modems and am waiting for my new Peplink Balance 380 enterprise multi-wan load-balancing router (»www.peplink.com/products/balance-380 ). Lots of research contributed to that decision, and though that particular router is $2000, my boss, the president and principal of the school would have signed off on a $6,000 Cisco router and a three year commitment to three new T1s that our ISP proposed. I didn't think that 4.5 Mb/s was going to address the bandwidth needs of the YouTube generation, so I recommended a different direction.
So we're keeping one T1 as our lifeline and they just installed the business class Comcast modems. We're paying for 8 Mb/s download and 1 Mb/s upload, but multiple tests over multiple days on speedtest.net showed *20* to *22* Mb/s download on each one every time. In our local area, most cable modems are residential, so they don't have much activity during the day, when we need the bandwidth.
A three year comparison of going the Cisco with multiple T1 route vs. going this way and replacing the T1 with DSL modem when the T1 contract runs out in 19 months, the cost savings was $40,000 over three years. I'd say that's worth the risk...
So I'll report back when I get the Peplink installed. Huligan, if you're still around, let us know how the XinCom worked out for you.
[edited- link to Peplink Balance 380 fixed] |
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Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS
| Nice looking unit, I would have probably brought up the USG300 ($1500ish )or possibly USG 1000 ($2300ish) for discussion.
»zyxel.com/web/product_family_det···79CE2C44 |
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schaps
Premium
join:2004-01-15
Saint Paul, MN
| reply to schaps
The Peplink is awesome! The drop-in mode installation means you don't have to change any settings on the firewall. I added the two Comcast business class cable lines to our existing T1, and it's doing load sharing based on ratios I assign, and it's amazingly fast.
The biggest problem I had was figuring out how to configure the SMC8014 cable modems/routers that Comcast uses for Business Class. They are actually router/switches set to distribute DHCP, but it turns out that if you assign the ports of the Peplink to the Comcast-assigned static IP, the SMC goes into regular bridge mode automagically.
I'm still getting speeds almost 20 Mb/s down 2.5 Mb/s up during the school day on each one, and if they conk out, we still have that old reliable expensive T1 that the router will failover to. At least until that T1 contract is up, that is. Then I'll probably get a DSL line. The Comcast modems have had no outages in the two weeks since they were installed.
You naysayers can spout "no SLA" all you want. The fact is, many businesses and schools are not as dependent on the internet as others are. The $40k our school will save over the next three years (vs. the 3 T1s our provider proposed and the principal signed off on before I found this other direction) will be put to good use in other areas of the school. And this is just freaking fast downloads. Plus, the ping times to the DNS servers are even faster through the cable modems than our T1.
That's my report. Your mileage may vary.
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"The most effective firewall has no windows or gates" |
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