Mixing slow and fast internets

[Palms]

Moving to new house in v rural area that has 1-2Mb broadband (unlimited) and 4G with 30Gb limit (taking on their contract)... need to work from home a few days per week and get through 100Gb per month.

Wondering if it's better to have 2 networks, slow and fast over whole house, or is there a way to have one and route different traffic over each connection? As well as normal browsing we stream a bit, use Skype and work VPN.

Open to ideas!! There is meant to be FTTP coming but already a year late!

 

[Pheasant Surprise]

Three ways of doing this that spring to mind.

1. Off the shelf "smart" router. A more sophisticated router, than your bog standard Netgear or TP Link job, with the ability to have multiple physical and logical interfaces to hook into your DSL line and 4G and run actual routing and load balancing algorithms - but it will be more expensive and require some patience and time to setup.

2. Build your own router (old PC running linux). As above, but probably even more tech savvy/patience needed. Software freely available on the internet, just find a spare box to run it on.

3. Run two completely separate networks - as you propose - manually decide which network to join - fast/expensive or slow/cheap. Probably the cheapest and simplest option, but will be a bit of a clunky solution, there will be downsides like shared network resources (printers, NAS drives etc), will need to be on one network or the other, so you might need to hop from WiFi network to the other for example.

 

[Palms]

Thanks pheasant, the OH is leaning towards the first option on single box.

Scratching our heads how we can route private tunnel to work MS Office cloud services as not something we can put in IP routing table, but will try and work something out!

 

[Pheasant Surprise]

Thanks pheasant, the OH is leaning towards the first option on single box.

Scratching our heads how we can route private tunnel to work MS Office cloud services as not something we can put in IP routing table, but will try and work something out!

Take a look at this tutorial on Policy Based Routing from DrayTek. Sounds like what you might want.

http://www.draytek.co.uk/information/our-technology/policy-routing