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.

[smoore]

f'in cool.

[Rhett]

How did you choose that router? The 600 series claims to be a little better.

[TimM]

[ QUOTE ]
How did you choose that router? The 600 series claims to be a little better.

[/ QUOTE ]

The XC-DPG602 is triple the price (almost $500) and there is only one real feature difference which I didn't need, since I am not running servers:

Authoritative DNS to IP:
The XC-DPG602 is an authoritative DNS to IP gateway that resolves a domain name to its respective IP addresses. This new capability allows for inbound failover and load balancing for servers located behind the gateway. Using dual WAN ports simultaneously increases available bandwidth for both uploads and download requests. You can set load balance type by Packets, Bytes RX+TX, Sessions, or IP Address.

http://www.xincom.com/twr_comparison.html

[Hendricks433]

how do you get wireless internet? run a ethernet from one of those ports to a wireless router?

[Rhett]

I found too many bad reviews regarding the firmware and stability of this router to decide to buy it now.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/othermfg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833174004

I'm glad the auto failover works good. It appears that you may have to reboot this router once a week or so, which I would hate to happen during a game. My linksys WRT54GS with Sveasoft firmware is pretty solid. I think I'm just going to leave my backup internet nearby to plug in by hand as needed.

[TimM]

[ QUOTE ]
I found too many bad reviews regarding the firmware and stability of this router to decide to buy it now.

[/ QUOTE ]

I've had it installed for a month now, and it's fine.

I do look at online reviews but I also take them with a grain of salt because what happens is that everyone who ever has a problem goes online and writes a bad review, and the satisfied users generally don't bother.

Complaints about support I just ignore because I would rather shoot myself than call support for just about any computer product. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[TimM]

[ QUOTE ]
how do you get wireless internet? run a ethernet from one of those ports to a wireless router?

[/ QUOTE ]

You can just add a wireless access point to your network, you don't need a wireless router. There was one dual wan router I found with wireless but it got awful reviews.