How Come Two Connections are slower than one?

By bruce ·
I have set up a Verizon DSL and a Comcast cable internet connections through a NetGear FVX538 dual WAN router. I configured it for load balancing instead of "rollover" thinking web page requests would be faster than either connection alone.

I must have some configuration wrong, because it alternately is slower or broken. In the configuration screens, each connection hits NetGear's site properly, so each connection is working.

There are references to dynamic DNS, which I have setup through a 3rd party provider, though I still do not grasp why DDNS should be necessary. I think Netgear wants the router to communicate with the DDNS (rather than the software I have installed onto a desk top) but it lists three providers, but not the one I chose -

ANy idea what I am doing wrong, or why they want DDNS??

It also broke my POP3 email account, because I guess Outlook doesn't know which ISP it will get each time, so the outgoing SMTP configs would be wrong.

As a work around, I am using the godaddy relay server, that or if I felt real ambitous, I can bind the email service to one ISP and set Outlook to expect that ISP.

Hope you can help, as I am losing what little hair I've got.



This conversation is currently closed to new comments.

Thread display: Collapse - | Expand +

All Answers

Collapse -

% load share

by CG IT In reply to How Come Two Connections ...

load balancing on consumer level routers isn't an aggregate total of both lines contrary to what the sales people will tell you to get you to buy a dual WAN unit. Dual WANs on consumer products is more like using 2 different size hard drives in a RAID setting. one 80GB and 1 120 GB the aggregate total 160 GB [80 X2] not 200GB. Also you have to look at the total WAN throughput.

Some consumer level routers have 8mbps total throughput through the firewall [because of stateful packet inspection]. Higher level business routers have 45 mbps or 55 mbps throughput through the firewall.

To get both WAN public addresses to point to you, you need to either setup the router with DNS that will provide records for both public addresses or have a DDNS service and a domain name which then can point to both your public addresses e.g. = 10.XXX.XXX.XXX & 10.10.XXX.XXX

Related Discussions

Related Forums