I am researching dual-wan routers for trading. Thinking about using two ISP's (cable and DSL) to ensure high availability for my internet connection. Some discussion forums report that many consumer-grade dual-wan routers have poor reliability. But I have seen a couple positive comments about Peplink which offers a 2-port model in its commercial lineup. Please let me know if you have any direct experience with this vendor's product? Link: http://www.peplink.com/balance/tech-spec/
Porc, I have a few questions I hope you can answer: 1) Why did you select Peplink as your router? Just curious, cause I never heard of them until I stumbled across them in some other forums. 2) Do you have the model 20, model 210, other? 3) Does the router maintain a single IP address to your computer so your trading session is not interrupted if either cable or DSL goes down? Thanks in advance!
had a long reply typed up and lost it. For $500 i can build you a box that will crush 5 of those model 1350 boxes. For $800 I can build you two boxes (in failover) that will crush a 1350 no questions asked. There are a lot of better solutions out there than paying $7k for a box with only one LAN port or paying $300 for a 4-port dual-wan router. You can buy a Cisco RV042 router for $75 that will do exactly the same as the 20 & 30.
Cisco pretty much "owns" the router market at the high end. But for the SMB market I have not heard good things. Either you get the rebranded Linksys routers which have reliability problems, or you get a heritage Cisco router that is difficult to administer and has lots of negative reviews where I looked (Amazon, Newegg).
Answer to 1) Similar to you, I wanted a backup internet provider. So I started looking and found that over the last few years many network equipment companies stopped making Dual WAN routers for the small business. I found only 3 manufactures which I could easily buy: - Cisco: 4 Port VPN Dual WAN. It is actually a Linksys router. I was not to happy with the Linksys equipment. Other people had negative comments too (I know don't believe anything on the internet...but like I said, was not too happy with my former Linksys equipment). But the price of this device is good. - ZyXEL ZyWALL: Could not find too much user comments on this device, and did not like their website. - Peplink: Also had problems finding a lot of user comments on the device. I have a friend from Asia and he said that Peplink has a good reputation there. I finally found this review and decided to go for it: http://wordpressexpert.net/matt-peplink-multi-wan-routers/ This was over half a year ago...I believe there is also a dual WAN Router from Netgear available, which normally builds fine networking devices. Answer to 2) 20. Reason: see the link I posted in the review above. Plus the price. Answer to 3) Disclaimer: I am not a network expert...so don't just take my word for it. I am not sure if this is possible, since you connect via 2 different providers to the internet, which have 2 different IP addresses assigned to you. The router will take one internet provider for the whole time you are connected to your broker. Once this internet provider goes down, the router will switch to the other internet provider. This means that you have to reconnect to the other server with a different IP since you are now coming from a different network. If you are in an authenticated session (i.e.: on a rate server where you have to provide username/password), you might have to re-enter your credentials. If your software has all your credentials saved, it might reconnect to the server via the 2nd internet provider automatically without you noticing. But it depends on your software and setup. I built an automated trading system which will automatically reconnect once it loses the connection, so the scenario with the internet provider switchover has been covered.
Sorry about my previous post...I did not read the question correctly ... the answer to 3 is YES, you will seamless switch over if one Internet provider goes down.
Porc, thanks for your comprehensive reply. I'm using TradeStation and I don't know if it would maintain the session or auto-reconnect. I would have to test it to be sure, and testing should be as simple as pulling the cable/DSL plug from the router and seeing what happens next. In any case, Peplink sounds like a good router solution. Additional comments on this topic are welcome.
If you have a spare PC handy you may consider a free router OS such as pfSense. For example you could use a PC with 3 NICs (2 WAN, 1 LAN), <1Ghz CPU, and ~256MB of RAM. pfSense is used by many organizations as a lower cost replacement for Cisco or Juniper routers. Juniper routers are built on the same OS as pfSense: FreeBSD. For the inexperienced it may take a bit of digging to get up and running, but it might save you a few hundred bucks. You could probably hire someone for $50 to set it up for you if you didn't want to deal with support from forums/IRC, etc. BTW, v2.0-RC3 is recommended even though its a Release Candidate. Yes your software would still need to reconnect to your broker/data feed because a different IP would be in use after the failover occurs.
For $300 here is a kick-ass system: dell optiplex on ebay for $120. (anything dual core over 2ghz) intel pro 1000 PT dual gig nic (enter "x3959" on ebay) $65 (you can get a quad nic for $200) Cisco AIR-PI21AG-A-K9 on ebay for $25 "Cisco Console Cable" on ebay - $5 on ebay (decent) gigabit switch on ebay $70 The above gives you 1x NIC on motherboard (WAN1) and two LAN/WAN interfaces on the intel NIC for a total of 3 gigabit interfaces. BSD is free so load it up and you have web server, FTP server, firewall, router, dual-WAN capable, $70 gets you a GOOD 16-port managed switch which gets you VPN capability at gig speeds, etc. $300 will blow the doors off that peplink.