load balancing routers/switch

[233]

quick Q for some of the more knowledgeable types.


we have 2 fibre connections in the office and have added a vm connection for redundancy. thinking that if bt goes down we would loose both fibre connections but VM is a different network so gives us a backup.


is there a router/switch that will let us make full use of all 3 connections when everything's working rather than having a connection sitting idle doing nothing.

the reason for the need to backup is we are a taxi company and our entire dispatch is cloud based. no internet no dispatch. (and yes we have a 4g wifi box plugged in and charged and a couple of laptops available in case of power cuts too


so basically

80meg Fibre. 80 meg Fibre. 350meg Virgin
\ | /
Magic box of inter web merging
|
233s office network

 

[Caged]

https://www.draytek.co.uk/products/business/vigor-3220

That will do what you want. It sounds like you're happy to load balance across all connections rather than wanting to try and get the combined speed of all three connections for one client so basic load balancing is fine.

If you're happy with a bit more of a manual setup then the EdgeRouter line can also do this, see https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/205145990-EdgeRouter-Dual-WAN-Load-Balance-Feature

 

[bremen1874]

Having both fibre links now seems unnecessary.

With the 3220 you’ll need a couple of VDSL modems (cheap enough to get).

If you drop back to a single fibre link you could use a 2862 and also connect the 4G as failover.

 

[BigT]

How handy are you with networking and how much is price a factor? You could buy a mini PC with quad NICs and use pfSense for less but it won’t be as user friendly or come with manufacturer support like the Draytek. An option though.