Matt Van Stone

Currently I am with Telus for my high-speed DSL connection. It works ok for me. I get about 2.5Mbps/650Kbps speeds. But I have noticed that Shaw offers 7Mbps/1Mbps speeds for the same price as what I am paying with Telus. Now I have done my research and have found that the pro’s with Shaw are they have good customer service and provide better speeds. The pro’s with Telus are they wont give you a hard time if you go over your monthly usage (60GB/mo), which I regularly do. If I thought that Shaw wouldn’t care about my bandwidth usage then I would probably switch pretty quickly. However for the time being I think I’ll stay with Telus.

Somehow this got me into thinking about having both Shaw and Telus coming into my house. I could have the benefit of having higher speeds for my every day browsing and downloading and use the Telus connection for some of the heaver bandwidth usage. Through this I stumbled across Multi-WAN routers. These routers allow you to hook up 2 or more WAN’s (high-speed connections) into a single network.

The router then manages the traffic. In my case combining the two connections would essentially give me a 9.5Mbps/1.5Mbps connection. However that wouldn’t solve my usage issue as the majority of the traffic would end up going through the Shaw connection leaving me under on my Telus limit and over on my Shaw limit. Well it seems as though the routers allow for some routing rules that will put specific traffic through different connections. Also a Linux box can be setup instead of a router and Advance Routing rules can be used to send specific traffic through different channels.

This might be a little project I would be interested in trying out. I could give Shaw a try for a month and see which I prefer, or maybe I’d end up keeping both. In the best-case scenario I could have two Shaw lines coming in and combine them. In that case, I would never go over my limit and I would have the added speed to boot.

Here is forum thread I found with some basic information about multi-WAN routers and alternatives.

Known Dual Wan Routers for Those of you looking @ dslreports.com