Aurora Cable Internet (now part of Rogers) offers a 3 Mb/s symmetical cable modem service for SoHo clients, while Teksavvy offers a DSL service where you don’t have to deal with Bell tech support (even though the service is provided by Bell). Neither service is perfect. Teksavvy generally surfs the web faster while ACI/Rogers offers the faster upload speed (by about a factor of 4) for uploading large audio files to clients (either directly or via my hosting package servers with Hostgator (my preferred hosting provider for almost three years now) or 1and1 (an OK alternate)).

I have off-and-on had the two services and struggled with Dual-WAN routers. The Hawking H2BR4 worked reasonably well, but failover (as it always is with IP service) was messy and if I used load balancing mode some websites did not like the fact that some requests came from one IP address while others came from a second IP address for the same apparent session and the web pages loaded eratically.

When I upgraded to the SoHo cable service, I added a Netgear FVS124G Dual WAN router figuring that would be typical Netgear quality, but I (and reading some online reviews it appears others as well) were disappointed.

From the beginning, I also had a Netger FVS318 which I had used in California with my cable service and it worked and continues to work like a charm. I wish I could say the same for either Dual WAN router, especially the FVS124G.

For almost two years, I ran the cable modem via the FVS124G and the DSL modem via the FVS318. I had the FVS318 set to x.x.x.1 and the FVS124G set to x.x.x.2. In that way, depending on which gateway and DNS server I selected on each computer, I could easily control from the computer which service that computer used to access the Internet.

I was never sure if it was the cable service or the FVS124G causing intermittent problems with the cable service. I recently purchased an FVS318v3 and now have that on the DSL (which I consider primary for web surfing applications) and the old FVS318 is now on the cable service and the FVS124G is in a box. So far, so good, the cable service hasn’t worked better.

I think manual failover will also be easier. We do get multiple-hour outages from time-to-time on both services, so, since most of the computers are assigned to x.x.x.1, all I need to do is swap the LAN IP addresses between the two FVS318’s and change which one has DHCP activated (for the few items that use DHCP like the security system) and I can move all the primary Internet access from DSL to cable and back. If I need to do any uploads during that time, I would manually have to change the gateway and DNS addresses for the upload computer.

Connection-wise, this is simple, I just put a short LAN cable between the two FVS318s. If we ever get a fibre to the home system with really good throughput, I’m ready as the new FVS318 has a 10/100 WAN port while the old unit has only a 10 Mb/s WAN port.

I leave this set up so that there is one cable from the FVS-318 stack to the Gigabit Ethernet switch stack, so I can easily take everything (but the security system which plugs into the FVS318V3) offline should I so wish to do that.

Speaking of the switch stack, I have a 16-port GigE switch and a second 8-port GigE switch. I use the 8-port  switch for all my 100-BaseT devices. Since the uplink to this switch is GigE, it can’t saturate with 7 100 BaseT devices connected to it. The two smaller switches were cheaper than a 24-port GigE switch. Also, I really only have a half dozen or so items with GigE NICs. While the off-site backup NAS units do have GigE ports I’ve never bothered to update the media converters on the fibre to GigE as on most nights the 100 Base FX link only adds about a half hour or so of file transfer time and I don’t care as I’m sleeping while that happens.

If I need to have internet access during a meeting/seminar and I want to keep people off my main LAN, I can always break away the two FVS318s from each other and let the guests use the cable service with no ties to the DSL service or our NAS units.

As a final thought, the concept of two separate gateways/firewalls on the same network segment was the big gestalt to me when I realized I could just tell each computer which one to look at and I could swap which service was primary by just changing the gateway’s IP address, this all fell into place.