[SOLVED] Two ISP and homenetwork

[Johee32]

I am not entirely sure how to ask this question so i will try to explain my issue.
I've got BT Internet Infinity 2 in the house and that is connected to a TP Link Archer v400. I also have the BT Wholehome discs in various spots in the house. One is connected straight to the TP Router. The discs are placed through the house I have one in a room downstairs that also houses my sons computer. His computer (PC 2) plugs in through the BT Whole home disc with an Ethernet cable. In an upstairs office I have another disc as well as a Netgear GS308 8 port switch. The main PC (PC 1) is plugged into the switch which also caters for a printer HP Office Jet 860. In another room i have another PC (PC 3) with another disc connected directly. Now all the computers could talk to each other and print from the printer.
Now recently i got a Vodafone Gigacube 5G. I wanted to try it out and as we were having 4 people either working from home or doing schoolwork/playing during the lockdown I thought maybe I should have a back up.
Now the Gicacube is also plugged into the switch. The PC that sits in the same room as the Gigacube and the switch plug into he Gigacube and the internet i get on that computer is 5G with some pretty decent download speeds. However ever since i introduced the Gigacube none of the other computers can access the printer. Nor can i see the other computers from the PC.
I would imagine that what is happening is that I am effectively creating two networks. PC 2 and 3 can still see each other as they are on the same network through BT, whilst the PC upstairs and the printer have jumped over to Vodafone.
I guess my main question is how can I make sure that all computers can print regardless of which network they are on and is there anyway to set up file sharing between all the PC's. secondly is there anyway that I can have two ISP on the same network without causing these issues.
I also have a laptop that can print but only if i connect to the Gigacube.

I am not very experienced with networking issues in Windows 10 or any other platform for that matter. Quite happy to research and try to work things out but I have not been able to solve this issue without going back to my original setup and leaving the Gigacube out completely. Also I am not able to put the two routers in the same room and connect the directly to one another if that is an option as I do not get a 5g signal downstairs and i do not have a phone socket upstairs for the Archer 400.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

 

[SamirD]

So the problem is because, yes, you have two separate networks. And the reason systems are probably not seeing each other correctly is that you have 2 dhcp servers on the network. This will cause all sorts of havoc that you're just beginning to see.

What you need to do is take a step back and see exactly what you want to do. Using a multiwan router you can connect 2x (or even more) internet connections to the same network, but you need a way to get both direct internet connections to such a router and then your network would need to be connected to that router. This doesn't sound like it's possible, but if it is it would be your ideal scenario.

Otherwise what you can do is manually split your network having most of your network work as it did, and part of it permanently and manually assigned to the new 5g internet. This just needs some creative network configuration and wouldn't require anything else. The drawback is that not everyone would be able to use the new connection and that the devices that use this new connection won't have any backup connection in case it goes down.

 

[bill001g]

This is are you really sure you want to do this. The dual wan routers were created to make this somewhat easier. A basic overview is your would say assign the main router 192.168.1.1 and the 5g router 192.168.1.2. You would only allow dhcp to run on the main router which means the second router would not be used unless you manually configure the client to use it as its gateway.

 

[Johee32]

Thanks you both for your comments. I have actually manged to get a 5G signal in the downstairs room where the TP Link Archer router lives. I could now connect the two routers together. The Archer has 4 ports including 1 wan and the Gigacube has two port Lan1 and Lan2/wan.
What do you think the best/easiest setup would be for me.
I obviously want my cake and eat it too if that is possible . I wouldn't be against buying additional hardware if that would solve the problem and the costs isn't too exhuberant.

 

[bill001g]

You trade money for how much work you need to do. With a dual wan router you do all the configuration on that device. If you attempt it without you have to do configurations on the end devices. I guess it depends how many you have and how fancy you want things to be.

So the method without a router is to connect the 2 routers lan-lan. On which ever router you want to be the secondary connection you change the ip to say 192.168.1.2. You need to disable dhcp on this router and on the main router make sure the 192.168.1.2 is outside the dhcp scope to avoid it being assigned to a end machine.

Next on every device you want to use the secondary router put in static IP again making sure they are outside the scope of the primary dhcp router. You would change the gateway IP to 192.168.1.2

Now if you really want to be fancy you can use the route command to send certain destination ip say netflix to one gateway and other traffic to the other one. You can partially use both connections on a single machine. Still it gets very messy if you do too much of this.

 

[Johee32]

Bill001g. Thank you so much for the very quick responses. It was so easy when it was all plug and play I have entered a different level here.

I do have quite a lot of end devices. Sonos, mobiles, game devices ip cameras etc.
Could the archer device work as the router or am I better off getting a separate router into which I plug the gigabyte and the archer. I then use the new router as the main sources so to speak and plug by while home devices into there.
Could you recommend a router for this purpose.

Would something like this work. DrayTek Vigor 2862AC Quad-WAN Dual-Band ADSL2+/VDSL2 WiFi 5 Router w/ Load Balancing, VPN & 3G/4G LTE Support (2033Mbps AC)

Cheers

 

[bill001g]

I have not messed with dual wan routers for a long while so I can not make a good recommendation. I used a older cisco router when there were few other options. I know my current asus router is suppose to support it but since I only have 1 internet I have not really bothered to look at it. I have seen many comments about tplink dual wan routers but I can't say much. Tplink tends to have pretty good support and is well known so you would get questions answered.

You best options is likely to read some of the online manuals and see which you find easiest to configure. You do not need to have 2 ISP routers plugged into a dual wan. it is possible to have one connection on dsl if that is what you want. The problem will be the DSL requirement will greatly reduce the number of routers you have to choose from.

I assume you are doing this because your main internet is too slow. Be aware all this fancy dual wan stuff is done by the CPU so it could limit your speed. You likely can get at least 200mbps total from many routers. Otherwise you start looking at a small dual nic PC running one of the many linux based router images.

 

[Johee32]

Thanks buddy. I think I might go back to original setup and use the 5g for the devices that do not need to be on the main network such as mobiles fire sticks, sonos etc.
Really appreciate all your help.
I'll look into setting up a vpn that I can log into if other devices need to print or access files.

 

[Johee32]

I actually installed a WiFi card that i had in another PC that was not utilising it, thinking i could then switch between networks to get access to the home network when i wanted it. I found that my PC actually connects via WiFi to the Gigacube and via Ethernet to the home network without seemingly any conflicts. Been running for over a week and works fine. I obviously do not get the increased speeds in the whole house. Anyway thank you both for your help in this matter.