General Questions

I was reading up on this last night and I couldn't find too much outside of broadband blending....

Can anyone spout off reasons/uses, no matter how silly...for multiple Wans?

I'm very curious because it sounds like a cool idea...but I hear the phrase multiple wan and immediately think "WHY?"


Cheers.

...broadband merging as you were saying, multiple routing options through different providers with different speeds towards destinations, back-up possibilities with greater broadband than dialup, selective routing of lan clients outgoing through different isps, routing between wans, dropping excess packets to secondary connections, avoiding overloading one wan etc.... many reasons... as i am using a similar product derived from monowall just because of multi-wans

I recently added a DSL line at home in addition to my cable modem so I could do multiple WAN. It's a bit overkill for personal use, but I rely heavily on my Internet for consulting work and outages just aren't an option. For that reason, it's a tax write off to offset my consulting income, so doesn't cost quite as much out of pocket, though still not exactly cheap.

Redundancy and load balancing would be the most common uses. If I'm hammering one connection with heavy transfers, I can policy route certain more latency-sensitive traffic out the other (VPN, SSH, RDP, etc.). Things like that.

Plus, I have higher availability and substantially more bandwidth than I could ever get out of a connection with a good SLA, like a T1, and pay a fraction of the cost.

well, hot damn, multi-wan as a tax write-off....NOW i'm impressed...sounds worthy to me, thanks to all who posted.

Note: I'm NOT a CPA, or even remotely qualified to offer tax advice.    What is legal for me may not be for you. I own a business and have a home office, so I can do more of that type of stuff than most people can. I didn't want to give the impression that I'm filthy rich and have money to burn, as that's FAR from the case.

Any business that relies on the Internet at all should have multi WAN, especially if you're reliant upon lesser quality connections like cable or DSL.