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[Cracker]

Hi all

I have BT ADSL (no fibre from them here yet) and I am thinking of ordering Virgin Broadband only and then getting a dual-WAN router to combine the 2 for fail-over (main priority) and load balancing (hardly likely to kick in).

I'm looking at two options to make this work:

OPTION A - there are routers with 2 x WAN ports (e.g. DrayTek Vigor 2926) which means I would keep the BT Homehub and plug that and the Virgin router into it

OPTION B - and also ones with ADSL "modems" built in (e.g. DrayTek Vigor 2862) which would act as the modem for BT and I would simply plug the Virgin router into the additional WAN port.

Can anyone help with choosing between these solutions? I guess Option A has one less piece of kit but is also less future proof and requires configuring to work with BT and they can blame it for any future problems etc?

 Any other things I should take into account? Are these decent contenders for the role? Have I lost my mind thinking of doing this? (Reliability is very important, increased speed is also important and I have been reluctant to switch to Virgin alone until I saw this dual-WAN concept)

Thanks loads in advance....

[Weaver]

I recommend the Firebrick FB2900 for bonding in this kind of application. It’s very powerful and flexible. I love mine completely. Being able to edit, save, backup and diff the config in XML is a joy.

If you want to bond the two services together, so that you get double speed downloads, you could consider using AA’s L2TP service.

[Moderator edited to fix the broken [url=][/url] tags.]

[d2d4j]

Hi

Both Draytek would work and draytek have always been rock solid as we use them all the time

We use both as well as other draytek and used in both methods, with some using upto 4 wans and 4G

Personally I would not worry about using draytek with modem (adsl and fftc) and plugging VM as secondary wan, it should work fine and easy to connect to adsl/fttc (there is a wizard if not sure)

You could use weavers choice, but draytek are cheaper the firebox - however draytek will not bond, just load balance/failover

Many thanks

John

[PhilipD]

I recommend the Firebrick FB2900 for bonding in this kind of application. It’s very powerful and flexible. I love mine completely. Being able to edit, save, backup and diff the config in XML is a joy.

If you want to bond the two services together, so that you get double speed downloads, you could consider using AA’s L2TP service.

[Moderator edited to fix the broken [url=][/url] tags.]

£660.00 for the Firebrick 

To the OP, another option is to get something that will run pfSense, you can get something for a much more reasonable price or even for free if you have a PC you can reuse plus loads of info for configuring load balancing available online using pfSense.

Regards

Phil

[Alex Atkin UK]

I tried this once and could find zero documentation on how to get this working to actually bond two connections.   The AAISP documentation specifically mentions having to set the gateway to use to reach their L2TP server which inherently locks it to a single WAN.

Also puzzled that AAISP do not include instructions for pfSense.

[Ronski]

When I first got Virgin I used pfsense to load balance Virgin and Plustnet, I'm still using pfsense but only have one connection.

I find pfsense a very steep learning curve, and then I promptly forget most of it. I've installed Draytek router and access points at work and find this easier to get on with, I also find it easier to find easy to understand information online, where as pfsense is a lot harder.

[Cracker]

Thanks everyone - I have ordered a Draytek with the 2 x WAN ports to give more flexibility later.

I don't have any suitable kit laying around and I'm not techie enough to do something as clever as pfsense really.. though in the current climate the idea of learning was tempting... that said, there looks to be lots to play with on the DrayTek interface when that arrives!

[Ronski]

A good choice in my opinion, you'll probably login to the Draytek and be overwhelmed as there is so many options and settings, but its a case of working through it slowly and asking on here as I did.

You'll need to register with Draytek to access a lot of the online information, and it's well worth doing, they'll also email you when there are firmware updates.

[niemand]

Should mention using the A&A L2TP service would also cap you at 100 Mbps and provide 1 TB of usage per month. It would bottleneck the VM service.

[Clivers]

OPTION B - and also ones with ADSL "modems" built in (e.g. DrayTek Vigor 2862) which would act as the modem for BT and I would simply plug the Virgin router into the additional WAN port.

It sounds like you've gone for the 2926?

If you use the BT Home Hub i don't think they support bridge mode on the home version? only the business one? and that means you'll need a modem for the ADSL line or you will end up with Double NAT!