Dear all,
First can I say thanks to everyone who has contributed to this site, there appears to be lots of very useful information. I found your site when looking for information about dual WAN routers, and now have a host of questions Im hoping that someone can help with.
I have a basic fiber connection, 10 Mbit up and down, through the local electricity company. Now the cable TV provider is offering a 2Mbit down/200K up connection for a one time fee for $50, which I have signed up to and plan to use as a back up connection. This is where I started to investigate dual WAN routers to either load balance across the connections, or simply fail over to the lower quality line in case of issues with the first.
The first router I found was the TP Link TL-R470T+. Slowly as I read a little more Ive worked up through the TL-R480T+, to the TL-ER5120 and am now even thinking of the TL-ER6120!
What we have at home is very basic, a desk top PC, few laptops, NAS, a couple of printers, some smart phones. We have some music streaming systems, and I would also like to set up a video streaming system too. I have set up an Asterisk box, and mean to move the current analogue phone system over.
With all of these different applications running on the network it would be nice to be able to prioritize traffic based upon its type. i.e. VoIP traffic should always have priority, then skype traffic, down to things like torrents running on the NAS having a very low priority, in order to make the best use of the available bandwidth.
Reading through the TP Link routers on line documentation, Ive not seen is information about this kind of traffic shaping. There was information about giving priority to certain machines on the network, but that was all I could find. Am I mistaken?
Also Id like to stream media from a few different providers (some of whom use Geo IP restrictions). Therefore, Ive been looking at VPN solutions.
As I look at the TL-ER6120 I see they have some VPN connectivity. To my simple mind I am wondering, can I set up some VPN connections in the router so that all of the devices on my LAN get routed through the VPN, but only for a given set of sites?
Then one other thing I would like, is to enable remote VPN access into the home network. So that when out and about the laptops can still have access to resources on the home network. Iss this something that the TL-ER6120 can do well?
As I mentioned earlier, I was thinking of some of the simpler dual WAN routers. Then to achieve some of the features I wanted, I was going to set up a small Linux box.
The smaller routers only offer 100Mbit connections, and around the LAN I would prefer to have 1Gbit, which is how I got to the TL-ER5120. The for the additional features like VPN and traffic control I got to the TL-ER6120, although it is quite a lot more expensive than the TL-R470T+ I started with.
Is anyone able to make any suggestions as to the route I should be going here? Are there other devices I should be looking at instead?
Any and all advice is most welcomely received.
Thanks
First can I say thanks to everyone who has contributed to this site, there appears to be lots of very useful information. I found your site when looking for information about dual WAN routers, and now have a host of questions Im hoping that someone can help with.
I have a basic fiber connection, 10 Mbit up and down, through the local electricity company. Now the cable TV provider is offering a 2Mbit down/200K up connection for a one time fee for $50, which I have signed up to and plan to use as a back up connection. This is where I started to investigate dual WAN routers to either load balance across the connections, or simply fail over to the lower quality line in case of issues with the first.
The first router I found was the TP Link TL-R470T+. Slowly as I read a little more Ive worked up through the TL-R480T+, to the TL-ER5120 and am now even thinking of the TL-ER6120!
What we have at home is very basic, a desk top PC, few laptops, NAS, a couple of printers, some smart phones. We have some music streaming systems, and I would also like to set up a video streaming system too. I have set up an Asterisk box, and mean to move the current analogue phone system over.
With all of these different applications running on the network it would be nice to be able to prioritize traffic based upon its type. i.e. VoIP traffic should always have priority, then skype traffic, down to things like torrents running on the NAS having a very low priority, in order to make the best use of the available bandwidth.
Reading through the TP Link routers on line documentation, Ive not seen is information about this kind of traffic shaping. There was information about giving priority to certain machines on the network, but that was all I could find. Am I mistaken?
Also Id like to stream media from a few different providers (some of whom use Geo IP restrictions). Therefore, Ive been looking at VPN solutions.
As I look at the TL-ER6120 I see they have some VPN connectivity. To my simple mind I am wondering, can I set up some VPN connections in the router so that all of the devices on my LAN get routed through the VPN, but only for a given set of sites?
Then one other thing I would like, is to enable remote VPN access into the home network. So that when out and about the laptops can still have access to resources on the home network. Iss this something that the TL-ER6120 can do well?
As I mentioned earlier, I was thinking of some of the simpler dual WAN routers. Then to achieve some of the features I wanted, I was going to set up a small Linux box.
The smaller routers only offer 100Mbit connections, and around the LAN I would prefer to have 1Gbit, which is how I got to the TL-ER5120. The for the additional features like VPN and traffic control I got to the TL-ER6120, although it is quite a lot more expensive than the TL-R470T+ I started with.
Is anyone able to make any suggestions as to the route I should be going here? Are there other devices I should be looking at instead?
Any and all advice is most welcomely received.
Thanks