This is a great router for backup and load balancing and in general will give you improved performance but will not improve your connection speed. The following came from this review: http://www.practicallynetworked.com/review.asp?pid=386 "It won't give you a faster connection If you've used connection binding products before, you can just skip this bullet. But if you think that you'll get a twice-as-fast connection and be able to out-frag your gaming opponents, you'd better read this info from Page 2 of Nexland's User manual: Any single download on the network will not be able to exceed the maximum bandwidth available on a single WAN but the overall effect of this binding is that the entire network experiences vastly improved performance. The more computers you have, the greater the performance increase youâll notice over a single Internet connection"
of course it can't make your ISP any faster than it is. But it seems like it can make utilizing a backup ISP about as seamless as it gets.
Forgot to mention that. But if you've got 4 different quote streams going, plus your trading client, most of your bandwidth is spread across several connections. This is *exactly* what a router like this is good at load-balancing. Plus the redundancy factor. But it's true. It won't speed up that movie you're trying to suck off of USENET. One thing though, after perusing tons of reviews, I noticed that some of them, especially those from 6+ months ago, were negative, saying the device dropped packets on a regular basis and had to be reset often. They may have improved their firmware significantly between now and then, so the only way to know is to give it a try...I'll let you know how it goes when I can get around to this.
You can do it also with NT Server software, only to put 2 network cards in your PC and mention to NT to use these 2 cards at the same time. This will do the same effect than this routeur but in software.
What if you have a cable modem using a USB port and the DSL using the network card? Would this work as a backup using windows 2000?
Yes, but this way you can use one at a time. i.e. You can have only one ("USB port" or network card) enabled at a time. And if you're logged in as Admin, you can quickly switch between both.
Yes, you can do this with NT, in the way you specified, if it's the only device you want to give internet access to. Trouble is, I have at least 12 at last count... As an alternative to the hardware router, you could take an old box, put NT/Linux/FreeBSD on it and three NICs, and do the same...one NIC to the cable, one NIC to the DSL, and one NIC to a switch. Then just install DHCP, make the box your gateway and voila, you've got the same thing. And there are several great open-source projects for load-balancing too. I prefer hardware-only solutions to this sort of thing. I would hate to have my router go down because the hard drive crashed.
Just a note, I don't suggest to use USB modem if you have the choice to use a network card that is more reliable technology. I have seen some freek problem with USB modem and if these problems happen while you trade this could be painfull.