Dual Internet Connections to One Office?

[Fred Weston]

Linksys and other companies like them make routers that will accept multiple Internet connections. Keep in mind that what you think the definition of a connection going down is probably different than what your router thinks. Consider for a moment that if the Internet goes down, the ethernet interface that is connected to your router will probably remain up, so your router has no way to know that the connection has a problem. You should look for a router than can periodically check some upstream device to verify the connection is active. For example, the router might attempt to ping http://www.google.com every 60 seconds using the active Internet connection and switchover to the second connection if it doesn't get a response back after X number of attempts.

If you had the ability to install a computer running Linux, you could plug both Internet connections in to it and use it as your router. It would be fairly straightforward to use a shell script to test the Internet connection every 60 seconds and have it switch over to the backup connection is the primary went down.

Otherwise your best bet is to look at "Dual WAN" routers, they may not be as good / customizable but they are easy to set up.