Dual Internet Connection - Results

[TimM]

As I described in this post, I was having occasional outages on my cable internet service, and wanted to try DSL as a backup. Sometimes the outages were very short and would cause me to time out or almost time out on a hand, and other times they would last several hours. Obviously preventing disconnection just once at the right time or allowing me to continue playing through multi-hour outages could easily pay for months of DSL service.

It took over a month for Verizon to set up DSL on my line, but I received an e-mail saying it was done today, and I was able to install the modem and get everything running. I now have my cable modem and DSL modem connected to the WAN1 and WAN2 ports of my XiNCOM XC-DPG502 Twin WAN Router. Now the question was, would the poker sites handle a disconnection of one of the modems seemlessly?

First I tried Party Poker. I got on a play money table and began playing. I saw from the router's status page that all traffic was going to WAN1. While playing a hand, I then disconnected the cable connecting the cable modem and router. After one or two seconds of the "Establising Connection..." message, the hand resumed seemlessly. I was able to switch back and forth between connections this way with no problems.

I also tried this on Ultimate Bet and Poker Stars. UB seemed to work just as well as Party, but on Stars, the software seemed to wait a bit too long before attempting to re-establish the connection. My hand was timed out each time, but I was able to continue playing on the following hand. While this would not save me hands in cash games, it should still prevent a tournament player from losing entire entry fees to outages.