1960s brick built house home network (wired) - dual ISP

doopydug

doopydug

doopydug

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Hi guys - I am looking for some advice.

We are moving house soon and I want to instal network cabling before we decorate.

I have a couple of questions if anyone knowledgeable could assist ?

We will be fortunate to have two fast connections coming into the home - one will be Virgin Media 1.1GB service and the other will be EE Full Fibre 500 Essentials package

The plan is to have the EE router upstairs for work, in my study, and the Virgin Media router is already installed downstairs .

Question is - is it possible to have a switch that can accept BOTH inputs so that I can use the other if one of the ISPs fails / slows down / has slow resolution?

Secondly - is it better to just run cables direct from ISP routers to wall sockets in each room directly (for online gaming) or will a switch alter ping etc? (My son is VERY concerned about this lol)
 
We have three sources of internet, 1.1Gbps VM, 900Mbps FTTP and 4G as final backup. All handled with failover and some devices preferring one of these if both are available and there are many routers or router/firewall software than can handle this.

Secondly - is it better to just run cables direct from ISP routers to wall sockets in each room directly (for online gaming) or will a switch alter ping etc? (My son is VERY concerned about this lol)
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An extra switch or in fact several between an end user device and your internet service isn't going to make any effective difference (we're talking microseconds, not even milliseconds).
 
doopydug said:
Question is - is it possible to have a switch that can accept BOTH inputs so that I can use the other if one of the ISPs fails / slows down / has slow resolution?
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A multi-WAN router/gateway would allow for failover or load-balancing across the internet connections as well as give you the options to specify WAN/internet connections based on traffic type, device etc.
But this would ideally replace the VM* and EE routers which could be an issue, like digital landlines etc.

* The Virgin Media hub would be switched to 'modem mode' and the new router would connect to that.

doopydug said:
Secondly - is it better to just run cables direct from ISP routers to wall sockets in each room directly (for online gaming) or will a switch alter ping etc? (My son is VERY concerned about this lol)
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In a home network, a switch would a negligible difference to ping times.

Quartz said:
Look at Draytek routers e.g. the 2925 series.
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Draytek's are great, reliable and i can count the issues i've had with them on one hand over the last 10 years but, even a newer 2927 would struggle to achieve that VM's line speed even with hardware acceleration enabled, plus you would be port limited. You would ideally need to jump to the 2962 but then you've got to factor in AP cost on top.
 
doopydug said:
Hi guys - I am looking for some advice.

We are moving house soon and I want to instal network cabling before we decorate.

I have a couple of questions if anyone knowledgeable could assist ?

We will be fortunate to have two fast connections coming into the home - one will be Virgin Media 1.1GB service and the other will be EE Full Fibre 500 Essentials package

The plan is to have the EE router upstairs for work, in my study, and the Virgin Media router is already installed downstairs .

Question is - is it possible to have a switch that can accept BOTH inputs so that I can use the other if one of the ISPs fails / slows down / has slow resolution?

Secondly - is it better to just run cables direct from ISP routers to wall sockets in each room directly (for online gaming) or will a switch alter ping etc? (My son is VERY concerned about this lol)
Click to expand...

I'd imagine its easier to bring your internets into a network room where you can plug them into the same network infrastructure that'll do your load balance/failover, then cabling from there to all places in the house

As mentioned switch won't alter ping to a noticeable degree.

The only place I see extra latency is where I connect floors with a wifi bridge as I only wired 2 floors even then its single digit, still a lovely ~5Gb wifi link to NAS.

I use my router to handle switching, normally have my NAS doing it all, but I bought some asus Wifi7 gear with it all built is so have been using that currently whilst testing capabilities seems to work though only has 10G WAN1 and 1G for WAN2 which caps my 5G connection as it would match VM gigfibre, whereas my NAS has 2.5Gb per WAN.

I really wish I wired my house before moving in.
 
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Failover where it is either or one connection is one thing, some routers handle it well, but having both available and/or load balancing often encounters some limitations and issues sometimes with online games, etc. without using something more advanced - pfSense being one option - even then I think some games still can encounter situations where some of their connections get routed over different WAN interfaces and don't like it.
 
doopydug said:
Hi guys - I am looking for some advice.

We are moving house soon and I want to instal network cabling before we decorate.

I have a couple of questions if anyone knowledgeable could assist ?

We will be fortunate to have two fast connections coming into the home - one will be Virgin Media 1.1GB service and the other will be EE Full Fibre 500 Essentials package

The plan is to have the EE router upstairs for work, in my study, and the Virgin Media router is already installed downstairs .

Question is - is it possible to have a switch that can accept BOTH inputs so that I can use the other if one of the ISPs fails / slows down / has slow resolution?

Secondly - is it better to just run cables direct from ISP routers to wall sockets in each room directly (for online gaming) or will a switch alter ping etc? (My son is VERY concerned about this lol)
Click to expand...

There are many routers that have two WAN connections with failure or other options.

No, a switch will not alter the ping. The amount of delay a switch adds is tiny. About 0.05ms for gaming.
 
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Armageus said:
Whilst I too love drayteks, you'd be better off looking at PFSense/OPNSense to deal with those speeds. It's also infinitely flexible with regards to which traffic goes out of which connection, so you can use both but also have traffic fail over.
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Could you give me a model number - I cant seem to find anything at all other than links to firewalls ?
 
doopydug said:
Could you give me a model number - I cant seem to find anything at all other than links to firewalls ?
Click to expand...

Although Netgate do sell devices with pfSense pre-installed, the general approach with pfSense/OPNSense is to buy a suitable device for your requirements, such as a mini PC and install the software on it.

For example my triple WAN setup is running on pfSense on a 6 port mini PC and I have a backup virtual machine for pfSense in case of failure.
 
The Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Ultra can do dual wan failover. I use it with a similar setup (Vm and toob fibre) and it works great.
 
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