FIOS and Cable, Combining them both?

I asked about this a while ago, but the thread is over 6 months old now, and the question wasn't really answered. Anyways...

Me and my roomies have Verizon FIOS. It works well, but we have a ton of people using the connection for all it's worth. We've also had two outages with service (One was our fault, we paid the bill late by accident).

Anyways, I finally got my own connection as well via Commiecast just so I'd always have internet in my room. However, Comcast is much slower than FIOS (While we aren't completely sucking the connection dry anyways), so I would like to still use the FIOS as well, and combine the ISPs.

In my room, I've got my Mac Pro (dual gigabit ethernet) that I want always alive, and a buffalo router that is in switch mode, using DD-WRT (DHCP disabled, it obtains an IP from the ActionTec FIOS modem after going through another DD-WRT based Linksys).

I am willing to relocate the cable modem anywhere in the house, as long as I can still use it.

So using either the Mac Pro, or my buffalo is there any way to get both ISPs connected and running?

 

I think you need a load balancing router like these but they are pretty expensive. Cisco router can do this too but it's even more expensive. Don't know any other way...maybe it's possible if your buffalo router can be configured to use ECMP protocol..?

 

So you have a cable modem and a router (FIOS), and then you would like to sum both services, do I understand well?

 

Yup, that's the gist of it.

I'm willing to buy a new router, however I don't think I want to buy a "load balancing router" because;
A. They are far more expensive
B. I've heard bad reviews about most of the affordable ones.

 

To do so, you would need to have a protocol that works on the application layer on top of the TCP/IP protocol, which would certainly need an implementation in the router and the wireless nic. I don't know such protocol, but is a good idea though.

 

I made a diagram of my current network setup. I'll tweak this picture a bit as I figure stuff out, or need to address stuff I forgot to mention.

 

Not sure if this helps in any way but check this out.

 

Good drawing. The problems is that your Buffalo router has only one ISP IN port, so how can you combine the cable ISP and the FIOS ISP? Perhaps you need another wireless router and have an specific wireless nic in the laptop combining both signals, do you understand what I mean?

Anyway, even if you have a custom wireless nic, you will still need a custom protocol to do the rest, like reassembling the packets from one ISP with the other ISP and put them in order during the session. Remember TCP/IP is not made to accomplished such task, not yet anyway.

 

Like others have said you can't combine the connections. The best you could do is use them to balance the load of your network connection and use for redundancy.

 

We might have a different definition of combining. Since both FIOS and Cable will take away from download speed while you are uploading, I can upload only via FIOS, and have a full download speed via cable. I could also set certain ports/protocols that are very bandwidth invasive to use the FIOS, and use Cable for quick web browsing.

We have 6 adults living here that love bandwith, and the 20/5 FIOS line will often get clogged.

 

Check this page(it's old, I know), the OP want to combine ADSL and wireless in a way to use the wireless for browsing and the ADSL for downloading. Someone suggest to set up a proxy server(check post #5) and it seems to me that it might actually work.

 

We have AT&T & FIOS at work and we had to use a load balancer ot put them together. I am not sure if you can have 2 wired networks going on a computer at the same time. You would have to disable one port and then swap them when you want the other internet service.

Depending on what package you have with FIOS its very possible that your comcast bill is higher than the cost to upgrade to the next fastest FIOS package that will be much more bandwidth than what comcast gives you.

Also think about ways to limit or thorttle bandwidth if people are stupidly waisting it. I have the 20/3 package I think and even with 5 people file sharing thats plenty of bandwidth if you setup things right. The most important thing is to distribute the upload correctly as its very hard to saturate the download.

 

We have the fastest FIOS package available in our neighbourhood (we just upgraded last month too. Previously we've had some serious slowdowns that would make port 80 unusable).

 

Netgear makes 2 router/devices that can do load balancing and fallover. One is a router the other a SSL Firewall device. The router is probably the best bet unless you have a big switch you can use.
http://www.netgear.com/Products/VPNandSSL/WiredVPNFirewallRouters/FVX538.aspx

http://www.netgear.com/Products/VPNandSSL/WiredVPNFirewallRouters/FVS336G.aspx