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Combine ADSL with Leased Line

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by domtyler 1 view

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We are a small company of around 25 users. However our users tend to be very heavy users of the internet. With a limited budget, I would like to improve on our existing 256 kbps leased line. My thought was to combine the guaranteed bandwidth we already have with a 2 mbps ADSL connection, thereby achieving a good increase in speed while retaining the reliability of the leased line. Does anyone have any ideas how this can be achieved?

5 replies

by stillatit

Get the ADSL, and buy a low-cost router (Linksys, Netgear, etc.). Set the router's inside address to an address in the IP range your computers are using.

Pick some number of computers that will use the ADSL rather than the leased line. Change thedefault gateway on those machines to point to the inside address of the new router.

Set the router to pass traffic outbound only from the addresses you own. Set the existing router on the leased line similarly. (This prevents traffic using your site as a routing point.)

That is it. If the ADSL line ever goes down, you telnet into the new router and change its gateway address to the inside address of the router for the leased line, and change it back when the ADSL comes back.

If you have servers, such as a mail server or web server, leave them on the leased line, since the presumably have fixed IP addresses.

Good luck.

by computechie

You might want to consider upgrading your leased line for more bandwidth. I'm assuming you have a frac T1, you should be able to upgrade to 384 or 512kbps, which would double your current bandwidth. Another thing is to see if your current ISP will allow for possible upgrading to a burstable T1. If the users demand more bandwidth, they could get up to full T1 bandwidth, but when they dont need it, and also at night when no one is there, it would revert back to 256kbps. This can substantially increase bandwidth, and it wont cost all that much more money, since the bandwidth only increases in times of more demand. Binding your current connection with a DSL line could be acheived, but I've seen this done in similiar situations, and causes a lot of headaches down the road, especially if that DSL line goes down, your going to have to do some quick reconfiguring of your routers so they wont try and use the DSL line. I don't know how mission critical the Internet is for your users, but some good ISP's are offering dedicated DSL lines that cost a lot less than lease lines. They usually have a good response time to outages, but I can tell you for sure you cant beat a least line for it's reliability.

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