Question External Dual WAN Device ?

[navalweaponsofficer]

Greetings,

I will be testing the roll out of fiber in my neighborhood for the ISP. When testing I intend on using the new fiber connection as my primary internet connection and would like to use my current cable connection for fallback connectivity when they are patching and terminating connections. Hopefully this will not be too frequent but since I will be the first one connected to the system I can only assume that there will be disruptions. My router does have dual WAN with fallback sensing capability but I would prefer not to use it in this situation. However I am pretty sure I am going to have little to no choice.

Does anyone know of a device I can put before my router’s wan port that I can plug the two WANs into and one output cable to the router? I have scoured the internet and cannot find anything. Of course, if such a device exists I do not know what it is called so that can lead to search result issues as well. The best I can find that could do this is an ethernet A/B switch that is manually operated, this will get the job done but I was hoping for something capable of remote manual operation through IR or RF as the switch will need to be in a location with poor access.

Any ideas or recommendations?

Thanks!

 

[kanewolf]

Greetings,

I will be testing the roll out of fiber in my neighborhood for the ISP. When testing I intend on using the new fiber connection as my primary internet connection and would like to use my current cable connection for fallback connectivity when they are patching and terminating connections. Hopefully this will not be too frequent but since I will be the first one connected to the system I can only assume that there will be disruptions. My router does have dual WAN with fallback sensing capability but I would prefer not to use it in this situation. However I am pretty sure I am going to have little to no choice.

Does anyone know of a device I can put before my router’s wan port that I can plug the two WANs into and one output cable to the router? I have scoured the internet and cannot find anything. Of course, if such a device exists I do not know what it is called so that can lead to search result issues as well. The best I can find that could do this is an ethernet A/B switch that is manually operated, this will get the job done but I was hoping for something capable of remote manual operation through IR or RF as the switch will need to be in a location with poor access.

Any ideas or recommendations?

Thanks!

You have a device that will take two WAN ports. Your existing router. Use it.

 

[bill001g]

Buy another dual wan router ??

Pretty much this is exactly what those devices are designed for. They still are extremely limited in function but this is actually the only true "routing" function these device can do. Most consumer "routers" lack even this feature.

In general if you are ok changing it manually it will be trivial to setup. The automatic switching part of dual wan routers does not work all that well anyway. You can just log into the router and disable one of the wan interfaces and it will switch to the other.

Ethernet is not really designed to function like a simple a/b switch. If you were going to really use a manual one it is easier to just swap the ethernet cable. I guess you could use a managed switch that you can log into and manually turn ports on and off.
Doing this though might confuse your router. It all depends if it can figure out that the ISP is now different and it needs to get another IP address.

In any case dual wan is extremely limited in it usefulness. The largest issue is even if it automatically switches over perfectly all you end equipment is still going to see it. The shared WAN IP that all the devices are using changes so you will have to relog in to sites and you will get other issues where you might refresh sites or clear cookies.

 

[palladin9479]

If your SOHO device has dual WAN then just use that since anything else is going to more complicated and requires knowing OSPF or at least how to manipulate route metrics.

:More details:
There is no such thing as primary / backup with ethernet / TCPIP, all connections are active at all times. Instead we have route metrics and route algorithms that use those metrics to determine the optimal route to packet destination. In the case of a default gateway, you would have both external links up simultaneously and the non-preferred one would have a really high metric attached to it such that the routing algorithm always finds the preferred route optimal. Should the preferred route ever be unavailable, then the non-preferred route would be used even with it's higher metric value.