On Feb 10, 2008, at 9:51 AM, Harold Hallikainen wrote:

> this router had two WAN
> connections and would load share between the two

How well this work depends rather a lot on how well the WAN behaves  
when routing packets BACK to you, and how well the cooperate on  
routing to you in general.  With typical consumer ISPs, I suspect the  
amount of cooperation is pretty close to zero.  Most ISPs go to great  
pain to PREVENT customer-premises routers from actually participating  
in "routing."  (you mentioned cable and DSL; you are talking about  
"consumer" ISPs, right?)  I don't know  that routing has ever been  
sensitive to QoS variations between two networks, so picking an ISP  
per-service would probably need to be done manually.

NAT might work in your favor - I can sort-of visualize linked NAT  
tables that allow a single IP on your LAN to appear as one of two IPs  
on the internet in general, depending on manually configured  
decisions for QoS/etc.  This would theoretically solve the ISP  
routing issue, too.  I'm not sure whether any routers actually DO  
that, though.  The more I think about the problem, the more  
complicated it looks.

BillW

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