Dual-ISP Setup for Gaming Traffic Optimization

[jennasmith]

I am testing a dual-ISP setup at home to see how routing impacts online gaming performance. The goal is to:

Use ISP1 for general traffic (browsing, downloads, streaming).

Route gaming traffic (PUBG, Free Fire, COD Mobile, etc.) through ISP2 for lower latency and stability.

So far I have tried:

• Policy-based routing with access-lists matching gaming ports.
• Static default routes with IP SLA tracking for failover.
• Some basic QoS to prioritize UDP gaming traffic.

The challenge: when failover happens, some games disconnect instead of smoothly reconnecting on the backup ISP.

Has anyone experimented with dual-ISP setups specifically for gaming traffic?

Any tips on better handling NAT, session persistence, or fast failover so gaming sessions don’t drop?

Also, since I follow a lot of gaming communities (like Apkdazy), I see players frequently talking about routing issues, lag, and connection drops — so I thought this might be a fun crossover topic between networking and gaming.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Haven't reread all the prior replies, including mine, but if it hasn't yet been mentioned, gaming often works best with low latency and low loss.  Often, a huge amount of bandwidth is unnecessary (although that's what ISP's will most "advertise" and charge you for).

Generally, ISPs, especially consumer ISPs, offer little to no performance guarantees.  However, how well a particular ISP performs, may vary much, including based on the delivery media being used, and the usual load on the network branch you're connected to.

The above, possibly should be kept in mind when choosing your gaming ISP.