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Assumptions:

  1. Office locale with a dedicated leased line is literally a factor of 50x more expensive than broadband.
  2. I know nothing of office networking, but will hire appropriately if this is possible
  3. This is a 'back office' for workload processing. There will not be any hosted services from this office location

Can I subscribe to two broadband ISPs in one office and allow the network to randomly select which ISP a computer will use when starting up, or only one if the other is failing?

Robert Achmann
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  • In the correct jargon you will need to get a *"dual WAN router"* or *"Multi-WAN router"* to connect your local network to multiple providers simultaneously. Those devices will do traffic load-balancing over all WAN ports or automatic failover from an active to a standby connection. Those are primarily designed for improved internet access, additional measures are required when you want to run internet services. – HBruijn Sep 12 '18 at 13:23

2 Answers2

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You can connect your office to two different ISPs for redundancy but you need to configure your network to support this. Both ISPs will present your WAN router/firewall with a default gateway. It is up to you - or your network engineer/consultant - to configure it such that

  • some traffic uses ISP1, and the other traffic uses ISP2, with both serving as a backup for the other;
  • all traffic uses ISP1 primarily and ISP2 only as a backup;
  • ...

If both default gateways are valued equally, then the router/firewall at your enterprise edge will indeed randomly select one of the two gateways and thus access the internet via one or the other.

Given that your internal network (most likely) uses private IP addresses and the firewall will have to perform NAT, you should put some thought into your strategy, especially if you also host services, i.e. inbound access is required from the Internet.

Tommiie
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If you are planning for 2 isp's and you want to consume bandwidth of both below is what you can do

  1. get one dual wan router preferably cisco rv042 it has inbuild vpn which can be useful at times, at very low cost
  2. plug both isp's configure them
  3. select Load Balance (Auto Mode) under Dual wan section, it will auto balance load between both isp and consume both
  4. use same dns servers on both isp, as using different dns may break connections or timeouts

or You can get some cheap firewall boxes and configure it with dual wan

or if your comfortable with opensource and have will to learn then you can use pfsense, still you will need one system any low config will do

Setup Pfsense

Vijay Muddu
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