TL;DR: Is there a way to have two different (unreliable) ISPs connected to a single network switch, so that when one drops out, the home network is automatically switched to the other ISP?
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Hi all!
I am a networking hobbyist, and I built out a home network for a family friend of mine living in Mexico. They have an ISP reliability problem I have not encountered before. Their service frequently cuts in and out, and thus they have two separate ISPs to ensure connectivity at all times.
I currently have both ISP’s gateways plugged into the same unmanaged network switch. The hope is that if one ISP goes out, the switch will be smart enough to use the other one. In practice, when both ISPs are up and running, the network switch seems to flip randomly between the two of them which causes interruptions on the home network.
I would like to have both ISPs plugged in at the same time so my customer does not have to walk down to the switch swap inputs. Is this functionality I would need a mananaged switch to accomplish?
Let me know what you think, and thanks for your help!
AF
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You just need a router / gateway that supports load balancing across 2 WANs.
I know that the UI UDM-SE supports this, dont know about others.
Good video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHp0FA9yAKE&t=42s
Look for a router with multiple wan ports. I used a Luxul XBR-2300 for this style setup for years. My current Araknis AN-310 will do up to 3 Wan ports for fail over. It really depends on how much you’re willing to spend.
synology routers do this OOTB.
This is something a router would do, not a switch. You would need to have a router with multiple WAN ports so not most consumer routers
I can’t think of a way to do it with an unmanaged switch because, if I’m understanding correctly, it’s going to be a routing issue.
I think you need a router in the middle so that your entire home subnet has the same gateway. Then, when one of the uplinks goes down you don’t have to change gateways on anything but the primary router.
We use an Edgerouter-X for this.
This is called WAN failover (or policy based routing depending on your needs) and that’s of course the job of a router.
ISP’s gateways plugged into the same unmanaged network switch.
This will not work and will cause issues with your networks performance
Switch, no, router, yes. I used to run an old Linksys wifi router with DD-WRT firmware on it that had two WAN ports, one wired and one wireless. The wired was to my ISP, and the wireless was to my neighbor’s, with his consent, of course. If mine went down, I could easily switch to his.
something like TP-Link ER605 router, allows 2 wan links
Not by a switch. You’d need a multi-WAN port router. Something like the ER605 will do failover.
Get a TP-Link ER605 multi WAN router which is designed to do load balancing or failover with multiple WAN inputs.
Use a multi WAN firewall and plug all three ISP into it. You can build one yourself using opnsense or similar.
You can achieve this easily with a managed L3 switch, or 2 managed routers. Look up first hop redundancy protocols, specifically vrrp if you want to go with a non cisco managed switch. The switch must support vrf if implementing this solution - basically you need both isp routers to provide the network in the same subnet, on different ports on the switch. The 2 ports on the same switch will be segmented by vrf, and loop across from one vrf to the other. Set up vrrp between the 2 vrf and set up tracking reachability on the primary vrf. You can tweak timers if you want too, but I’d leave them at a few seconds at least for the track to go down and implement a vrrp decrement. Point the default gateway on lan to the vrrp vip address for automatic failover and back for the minimal interruptions. Just bear in mind that these are enterprise grade switches and solutions so cost might be prohibitive, especially in a lower income country. Also you will need to support these technologies so would be good to know what you’re doing as it’s a complex setup. There are other solutions possible, but then again they would rely on other enterprise grade equipment and technologies that you may or may not have access to, and are also going to be cost prohibitive. For a simpler solution, you could look into a consumer grade dual wan router, but I’m not sure if they exist or are any good. Best of luck
Sounds like you need a dual WAN router, and you’ll need to set your current two ISP modems so they are not assigning IP addresses. There are some consumer dual WAN routers you can get, I think Asus has some models. You can set them to use one ISP as the primary, and when that drops out, the router automatically uses the secondary. When the primary is back online, the router automatically changes back. You’ll get perhaps a few seconds of dropout but it shouldn’t need any user intervention.
Got an old computer sitting in a corner somewhere? Add a multi-port network card and set up Opnsence. Haven’t done it myself, but there are multiple web pages describing how to do just this.