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AdmiralGump
Premium Member
join:2007-12-15
Angier, NC

AdmiralGump

Premium Member

Looking for Dual WAN Router

I know this question has been asked plenty before but most of the posts I have read really don't answer the questions I have:

First, here is some background on my network.

2 Cable Modem Connections 1 is a 30 Meg connection and the other is a 50 Meg connection. Will have upgraded service here once TWC finishes the upgrades to MAXX which in my area should be in the next 60 days or so.

2 Asus Routers. (192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2)

10 Port Gigabit Switch that the routers and devices connect to.

I have a Windows 2012 Server dishing out DHCP to my devices and based on the MAC address I assign 1 of the 2 current gateways

I am looking for a dual WAN router.

What I want:

1. Capable of 300 Meg on the WAN connections. Will have 300 Meg internet service here soon.

2. Gigabit on the LAN ports. 4 ports will be plenty

3. Be able to specify which WAN port to route to.

4. Don't necessarily need VPN. If it happens to come along with it, that's just a bonus.

5. With or without wireless capability. One without is not a deal breaker.

6. Doesn't necessarily need to load balance, will want to route to a specific WAN conection.

7. Would like it to handle the DHCP for me and be able to assign the gateway/WAN port based on MAC if possible.

My budget is $300-$400 max but would prefer less than $300. Don't care about brand as long as it will do what I need it to do.

I am pretty good technical wise and I am not afraid of more complicated configurations.

Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium Member
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS

2 edits

Anav

Premium Member

»www.provantage.com/zyxel ··· 90MJ.htm
Fits your budget, can handle L2TPVPN, hands out DHCP and easily lets you control which wan interface your internal lans use.

Not sure what you mean by mac address but you can set IPMAC bindings to IP addresses manually or after DHCP assignment you can easily reserve them which auto applies IPMAC binding.
Anav

Anav

Premium Member

The spec sheets notes a throughput of 1000 but this is using clean conditions and optimal packet sizes and is a combined up and down concurrent throughput. To calculate a one way throughput in real world conditions, multiple by roughly from .65

Looking at smallnetbuilders to compare specs to their more realistic testing, they have results for the USG110 which is also rated at 1000. In their testing wan to lan came to 662, lan to wan 420 and combined simultaneous up and down came to 629.

In other words, most spec sheets mean sheite, look for other test results.

All this means is that it bodes well to handle two WAN to LAN connections of 300.

(I have the USG40W which is rated at 400, and applying a .65 rule I should expect no more that 260 in the real world. (My ISP is 75 down, 30 up and I have no problems with those speeds). In smallnetbuilder testing it provided wan to lan of 235, lan to wan of 242, and combined speed of 225.

So I have room for growth!!
AdmiralGump
Premium Member
join:2007-12-15
Angier, NC

AdmiralGump

Premium Member

Thanks a ton. I pulled the Users guide and I am looking thru it now. So far it looks like it will do everything I need. Will definitely be researching this router.

davidg
Good Bye My Friend
MVM
join:2002-06-15
00000

davidg to AdmiralGump

MVM

to AdmiralGump
check out ubiquity's edge router series too, we use one at work to combine cable/uverse for failover purposes. all ports on our ER-POE are gig capable and even maxing out our 50/8 cable connection barely puts a load on the processor(under 10%).
lawsoncl
join:2008-10-28
Spirit Lake, ID

lawsoncl to AdmiralGump

Member

to AdmiralGump
said by AdmiralGump:

based on the MAC address I assign 1 of the 2 current gateways

This doesn't really provide any failover, unless you manually change the DHCP setup and the clients have a very short lease reservation time. I would definitely steer towards either a dual-wan modem that can take care of the load balancing, or a smarter router in front of separate modems than can handle the multiple paths properly.

Some good suggestions above, too.
AdmiralGump
Premium Member
join:2007-12-15
Angier, NC

AdmiralGump

Premium Member

said by lawsoncl:

This doesn't really provide any failover, unless you manually change the DHCP setup and the clients have a very short lease reservation time. I would definitely steer towards either a dual-wan modem that can take care of the load balancing, or a smarter router in front of separate modems than can handle the multiple paths properly

I am not concerned with failover or load balancing. I just want to be able to route certain PC's to a certain WAN port.

I read up on the USG60 and ended up ordering one. Should be here tomorrow so I can play with it over the weekend. Looking forward to getting rid of these consumer brand routers that strain themselves whenever I put a high load on them. I will post in the Networking Hardware forum with my review, etc once I am done getting it setup and have had a chance to see it in action for myself.

Going to continue reading the users guide today so I can just jump right in once the router arrives.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium Member
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS

1 recommendation

Anav

Premium Member

You can get all your questions answered in the zyxel hardware forum for sure.
The configuration part of the menu contains the Interface submenu where you will find policy routes. Its quite easy to basically state all traffic from an interface (ie LAN1) should go to either an external interface (WAN1 or WAN2 etc) or to the TRUNK (for the next hop). The trunk is the primary way the router deals with the dual wan nature and any load balancing required. I have created my own TRUNK setup such that is uses spill over. Since I set it to maximum throughput it never spills over which serves my purpose. I have a primary 75/30 connection (bell fibreop) for all users and a secondary 1.5/.75 for email connection and emergency backup (cable) mine setup.

Thus my policy routes (and order in rules is important in all of the zyxel rules pages) consiste of the first one saying
- all traffic from lansubnets going out with IP address (WANIP of ISPs email) AND on the smtp port , your next hop is the WAN2 interface.
- next rule, all traffic from lansubnets to any ip on any service, your next hop is the trunk.

In this way, email works, all users outbound will use the primary internet connection and if the primary fails, all users will get (via the trunk) access to the secondary internet albeit slow network. So the trunk provides a way to apportion wan use and provides redundancy.

VZBTech, although your not concerned with apportioning bandwidth (like myself) you should still think about the redundancy aspect.
HELLFIRE
MVM
join:2009-11-25

HELLFIRE to AdmiralGump

MVM

to AdmiralGump
Was also going to suggest the Edgerouter ERL.

Some other possibilities to consider are Mikrotik, Peplink, or a spare PC with a *nix router distro loaded -- pfsense among others is fairly popular.

My 00000010bits

Regards

Lasko
@speedyglass.com

Lasko

Anon

We went with ZyXel devices a couple of years ago in our network. Unfortunately 3 devices failed in the first year. We are in the middle of switching to Ubiquity's Edgerouters. So far no failures with them. Highly recommended.