Compatibility - DS-1/Cable/DSL? (2801)

[AlexAckley]

Anyone with any experience in working with a mixed bag of Internet Access? I'm currently running a 2801 with 2 DS1 WICs connected to a bonded pair of DS1s. The roughly 3MB of bandwidth just isn't enough so my boss wants to add in cable and/or DSL to the mix to increase the download speed to handle some new applications.

So what I could end up with is a 2801 router with a dual port T1/DS1 WIC, a Cable HWIC and a DSL HWIC to provide the bandwidth needed.

Is that going to cause any major issues?

[paolo bevilacqua]

The issue is configuration. When you have multiple ISP you need a special configuration, that becomes ever more complicated as you wante automatic failover, or specialized routeting based on source/address.

If you feel you can follow up on that, yes it can be done. Else the earier would be add other T1s to the bundle you've already, keeping one single fat ISP.

Hope this helps, please rate post if it does!

[AlexAckley]

Thanks. So just configuration issues.. no hidden gotcha's from trying to add bandwidth with different connection types.

[paolo bevilacqua]

Actually, when you have different ISPs, there are always gotcha's.

For example let's you have a 3mbp pipe, and an 8mb ADSL pipe, from different ISPs.

You want to download an huge file from the internet, and find that it goes slow, as it's trying to use the 3 mb pipe. This is because with the simplest configuration, the router will decide which circuit to use at random, and may happen to choose the wrong one.

So you do some special configuration so that the particular website with huge files is accessed from the 8mb circuit only, problem the day after the circumstances have changed again and you are there trying to optimize the connection all the time. Or you try certain special configuration so that the router uses the less load circuit, but find that this is complicated to use in practice, and not very stable.

In short, if you want an easy life and a sure result, get multiple T1s from a single provider, and bundle them together under an single virtual interface.