Is this possible? I want to keep my son's heavy internet downloads and xbox live & pc use on a completly separate line, while maintaining both cable and dsl for myself through a dual wan router with auto-failover.
It's certainly technically feasible for sure - it really will depend on your cable and/or DSL provider, as to whether or not they will run multiple lines into your house. When I was trading full-time, I used a cable modem as my primary internet connection, and had a dial-up line active at all times as a redundant backup. 2 separate NIC's into one PC, with separate IP addresses. I created a little batch script, that would quickly switch over my "route", in the event of failure. Another alternative might be to purchase a router that allows you to limit (or throttle) bandwidth usage over a particular IP on your network. That might be a way to control your son's usage of XBox, while you are trading. There are some free third-party firmware replacement packages that do this sort of stuff, e.g.: http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
FWIW- I have over the years used a t-1 to trade from into my home. While this connection was best and worked for me I think the high cost keeps some traders from making that decision. this past year beginning in 2008 i decided that I would go away from my T-1 setup to having 2 DSL lines into my home office. I have both DSL lines coming from Bellsouth and I have made sure that each one of these lines is running on different fiber rings around my city. I have confirmed with them that this redundancy will allow my connection to stay up due to a equipment failure at either a SLIC or at the CO. It does not however stop some idiot from digging up the neighborhood fiber line as happened to me a few weeks ago while I was holding 250k shares of C. this being said i find that this setup has worked best for me for download speeds and reliability. I have both connections running into a Xincom dual wan router that combines both connections into one pipe. Also, the redundancy built into this router allows automatic failover if one of the lines goes down. I find this setup to be the most economical and reliable. It is possible and being done. I know one trader that has 4 DSL lines coming into his home office. So do more research and you will see that this is truly the best solution.
You need to remember that with cable his downloads would be riding the same wire as your data until it hit the new service cable that runs from the distribution cable to your house. That is why cable can potentially slow way down if a bunch of downloading is occurring in the same area. With DSL you have a dedicated pair all the way from the central office, so a separate phone to the house would provide that. I guess another alternative for him might be wireless service from VZ, T or S. Also, there are various speeds of service available, so the highest speed cable service could still be faster than than the DSL alternative even with his downloading. Good luck.
Just get FIOS and a phone to call your broker if there is downtime. No need for redundant lines in my opinion.
I believe my DSL is 6MB/512KB. It works very well. FastAcess Extreme is the name for the service I have.
It is quite possible with 2 DSL or more. Some of the new homes are built with 3 pairs of wires around the house and the phone company is also pre-wired to your demarcation point with 3 pairs. All they need is to turn on the second phone or third phone when you request. If you live in an older neighborhood, they may run new wires into your demarc but you may need to have a contractor to run new wires from there into your room where you want the second phoneline goes to. DSL uses the same pair of wires that is used for your existing phone line so that the phone company doesn't need to run new wire. A second cable service will definitely need to run a new coaxial cable into your house - if they would do it.
It's good to know that two separate dsl lines, bearing their own data load is possible. I was thinking that two dsl lines might have to be forced through some sort of bottleneck which would not help my situation. With your Xincom router, it sounds like your using what they refer to as a load balancing feature. Does the load balancing also give you auto-failover or do you have to choose either the load balancing option OR auto-failover option. Its not clear in the Xincom literature.
Now that I know its possible to have three separate internet pipes, I'm not going to worry about the extra cost. It'll be worth it. Right now he's had a World of Warcraft download going on for about three hours and my ping which is normally around 25ms has gone up to over 2000ms.