2 Internet Connections + 2 NIC Ports

[Zico]

I'm looking at joining vFast (www.vFast.co.uk) as a complementary internet connection at home.

Our 2mb DSL connection with Sky is fine though, when everyone at home is online, doesn’t hold up very well with multiple simultaneous streaming/surfing or downloads (note one brother streaming live football, dad surfing, two other brothers surfing/gaming or streaming and me surfing/downloading + Xbox Live).

Now to my question.

If I were to have a Wimax connection via a broadband router connected to one of my motherboard's gigabit lan ports and our Sky DSL connection via the Sky router connected to the other gigabit lan port, can I tell Windows to use one connection over the other without having to disable/disconnect one of the cables?

If I have to disable/disconnect a cable then I would loose connection to our home network (which although a minor inconvenience, would mean that nobody could print or transfer files from my own PC during that time).

[Burble]

It's possible but a bit of a fiddle. What you'd need to do is manually change the routing table on your PC so that to get to the internet it uses the NIC connected to the Sky DSL connection but for internet stuff it'll use the other.

Let's say that the Sky router is 192.168.0.1 with a 255.255.255.0 subnet (or 192.168.0.1/24 for short) and that the vFast router is 192.168.1.1/24. If you needed to switch over to the vFast internet connection then open a command prompt and issues these commands:

route delete 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1
route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1

The first command tells Windows to not go through the Sky connection to get to the internet, the second command tells it to use the vFast connection for all internetty stuff.

[Zico]

I take it that if I wanted to reverse the process then I would just have to swap over the router IPs?

Could the above be added to a batch file/s and run on demand? Set to Sky for internet and set to vFast for internet. In addition to the above would either command be a permanent setting or something that would revert to Windows default on reboot/restart?

[Burble]

You could either reboot the PC (you can make routing changes persistent so they'll stay after a reboot but I've done given the command to do that) to set things back to normal or issue these commands:

route delete 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.2.1
route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1

Yep, no problem to add the commands to a batch file.

[Zico]

Burble, thanks for the help.

Shame it was a wasted thread. Apparantly the house isn't covered by there network so bugger on better BB until FTTC/H.