Dual Internet Connections to One Office?

[odinscharge]

I have two separate internet connections going into one office. Either of them is fast enough for the entire office (small office). The second cable is just as a back up to the first as the office is in a remote hard to get to location. I was wondering the best way to put them both in place so that if one goes down the other would automatically be used.

[Paul]

You'll need to start with a Router that has dual WAN ports so you can plug them both in... Once that is set you will need to get into the Routers settings and configure the load balancing..

here is a link to a short guide that may get you pointed in the right direction..

http://www.kindawannadothat.com/2009/10/...an-router/

[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.