Advice on adding a second internet connection to a business

joey1211

joey1211

joey1211

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We have an ADSL line with a download speed of around 6.5Mb/s, with a static ip address.

I have been asked to look into adding a second internet connection as our current connection is sometimes unusable due to clients sending us large files via email etc.

So, I'm thinking of getting a Draytek Vigor 2830 Router which has 3 WAN ports (2 cabled, 1 for a 3g USB dongle) and using the load balancing and QoS features. I have zero experience of using these, so...

Load balancing, does this allow a user to download files using both connections simultaneoulsy? How effective are the QoS options?

Users currently use OWA and remote access to work from home. Will having two ip external ip address affect this in any way?

Any other pitfalls that I haven't forseen?

Were also looking at Shareband, but they want £20 per line per month. Is this just paying out for something that can be achieved internally?

Thanks
 
No answer for you but i'm also interested, we have a single not very good adsl connection and no hint of fibre on the horizon. Doubling up could be interesting.
 
It's not so much that the connection is bad, but when a big download is in progress it chokes the bandwidth for everyone else.
 
You won't be able to achieve what Shareband are offering yourself.

What I have done in the past is have multiple ADSL connections and reserve them for different tasks. One ADSL connection was used for the mail server and a site-to-site vpn, and the other for user web access. This doesn't even need clever routers, it's just a matter of configuring things to use the correct gateway address.

Can you provide more details about your current setup and the internal/external services you're using?
 
We have Microsoft SBS 2003 which is accessed externally using OWA and Remote Web Workplace. This is accessed via it's ip address as only a few users have access.
 
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Assuming the server IP is 192.168.16.2, the existing router’s IP is 192.168.16.1, the server is handling DHCP, and you’re running with a single NIC on the server and no ISA, you could do something like the following:-

  • Get a second ADSL connection installed (doesn’t need a static IP, but it wouldn’t hurt).
  • Configure the new router to use 192.168.16.254 and disable all unnecessary services such as DHCP.
  • Connect the new router to the existing LAN.
  • Change the gateway address of the client PCs to 192.168.16.254.
The client PCs will then use the new connection for their internet access. The server will continue to use the old connection so there shouldn’t need to be any reconfiguration.

The only other thing you might need to do is configure some static routes on the clients to make sure OWA traffic gets routed through the correct gateway. I’m not sure it this would actually be necessary or not, it’s a while since I’ve worked with a SBS2003 network.
 
Cheers Bremen1874

As we're a small company, I might get someone in to help with this. Day-to-day running I'm OK with, but the time researching this and any problems that occur is beyond me

Thanks again!
 
I have a site setup exactly list this with a 2830 load balancing a Talk Talk business adsl line and also a bonded Be connection on its wan port.

Outbound connections will go out over one of the two connections but not both at the same time, ie 2x 6mb connections won't give you a 12mb donwload speed but it does help having numerous users going out over both connections rather than swamping one. The load balancer does this automatically for you. You can assign protocols to a connection if needed such as outbound SMTP.

Inbound OWA connections will only come in on one of the connections so we've assigned it the one with the best upload speed. You'll need to assign inbound SMTP to one of the connections if you use it.
 
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