Two modems

[John Kirkland]

I am going to install a second modem, and cannot find anything about the best wiring configuration. 1st off, may i ask if a standard RG11 drop coming into junction box on my house even affectively carry 2 seperate modems, working at peak performance? If so, then my next question would be: What would be the best wire/splitter configuartion be? From what ive gathered, the only/best solution is to use a Balanced 3 way splitter. Drop hooking to the input/source, and 2 of the out ports would go directly to the 2 modems, leaving the 3rd port to go to a TV, or splitter, depending on how many Tv's you have. I have Charter communications, and yes they will give me a second modem, @ another charge of course, but saiud they would not run another "Drop" from the pole to my house, which would be Optimal. Thanks. PS: I'll answer before its asked...I have 3 Xones, 4 smart tvs, and about 21 PC/devices that use internet, and i want to split the load and maintain good bandwidth.

 

[taz420nj]

'Standard' drops are usually RG-6 unless its over 150'. Yes, assuming the signal is strong enough and the return path is within spec, it will support two modems - especially if it's RG-11. Yes, in your case with a single drop the balanced splitter will be your best route, since you get -5dB insertion loss versus a -3.5 and two -7dB.

Where you start running into issues is when you have to split it to more than a few digital boxes on top of the modems. The more splits and the more devices that have to use the DOCSIS return path, the more likely you are to have issues. The ideal solution (as you have already mentioned) is to have a second drop installed. When I had a cable modem, I also had 6 digital boxes - and even with the 2-way/6 way splitter stack, It'd be fine with 5 boxes but everything - including the modem - started having issues when the 6th was connected. I asked Cablevision to run a second drop, and since the issue was confirmed by a tech, they agreed. It may take you having that type of issue confirmed before Charter will do it as well.

What's your U/D pipes on each modem? Do you already have the networking side in mind yet? How many of these devices are wireless? You will need a multiple WAN router unless you are content simply connecting half the devices to single routers (but they won't be able to see each other). You might consider building a pfSense box (WatchGuard Fireboxes make great low-cost pfSense routers) or buying a pre-configured unit. pfSense has great load balancing/failover capabilities.

 

[John Kirkland]

Thanks Taz. I currently have a Linksys EA8500 on the existing network. Any of my gaming consoles are hardwired to the router. When i get the second modem, i will buy another EA8500 and create another seperate network. Not sure how i will split the devices yet, will have to tinker, and decide which has top priority. After speaking with my daughter, i may end up cutting off my cable tv part all together, as she mainly watches Hulu/netflix through the Wifi anyway. If this ends up being the case, i'll just get a single 2 way splitter to run to each modem...Are the "Extreme" brands any good? I may be @ the verge of 150' from the road, but i figured all drops would be RG11, since homes now have so many devices.... My current U/D is 4/60. Seems charter is greedy when it comes to their UL, as most comps ive seen give around 1/10 UL according to their DL. Charter does offer a 100 M service, but it comes with a $200 install fee, and costs about 20 bucks per month higher than getting 2 - 60M services....

 

[taz420nj]

Honestly your best bet is to use a router that supports multi-WAN and let it handle the load balancing/QoS, whether you buy a commercial router or build/buy a pfSense box. With separate networks what works today may not be ideal tomorrow. Plus you'll be able to use failover - if one link goes down, the other will take over.

Cutting the cord is absolutely an option as well, although keep in mind your internet may go up by like $10 per line if you drop TV. You may be able to get locals in HD through a roof antenna. That's what I'm doing.

Unfortunately the EA8500 is not compatible with DD-WRT, otherwise I'd suggest flashing it to use it as an AP rather than a router. Considering the sheer number of devices you have (including gaming devices), it may have issues keeping up with heavy use .

Is Charter your only option? Any fiber in your area? Fiber providers tend to offer higher speeds at lower prices than cable. For example I have 50/10 fiber for $60 a month.. The cable company wants $100 a month for 50/5 (their max speed). The fiber company also offers 100/50, 100/100, 250/250, 1GB/250, and 1GB/1GB..

 

[John Kirkland]

I'll do some reading on the "Multi Wan" routers, as you just lost me, lol...I know just enough to make me get on here and ask silly questions.... I didnt even know there was such a thing of a multi wan router.. So basically it would take in 2 seperate IP's and turn them into a single? or would it still require setting up 2 networks? As far as Fiber...."PUFF" charter claims it uses fiber somewhere, but only god knows where. And i figured here was like most places, One ISP has the monopoly, other than DSL or The forgotten SAT, if it still exists. Current prices arent too bad, about $50 bucks for the 60m .

 

[John Kirkland]

Off topic, but i could not resist....Charter has been increasing Tv prices, over the years, and now they have disabled the FF FR and pause on all of their "ON Demand" shows, which is the only thing i watched anyway..The series...The premiums are horrid, The same old movies over and over and over, and 99% of them ive already seen thanks to my VPN, tehe. Seems we pay their "PREMIUM" price tag, and Have to endure 173 commercials during a 1 hour episode of anything....At least in the 70's Tv was FTA, and you didnt moan about a couple of commercials during a movie....

 

[Aquinus]

So basically it would take in 2 separate IP's and turn them into a single? or would it still require setting up 2 networks?

Not exactly, it handles using the two different IPs for all the traffic on your network. You can't really combine two IPs together to double your maximum speed, networks don't work that way. It's more of a case where some clients would be running off of one modem and the rest off of an other or the second modem would be used as redundancy to ensure stability.

 

[taz420nj]

Yeah like he said it doesn't 'double' your speed per se, but due to the way the router handles the packets, 'technically' it does. Basically each time a connection is made through a router configured with multiple WANs and load balancing, the router assigns the connection the least utilized pipe (after applying QoS and static routing rules).. So say your network is idle and you start a Netflix stream.. That connection would go through WAN1. Another Netflix connection would go through WAN2 because it has less utilization than WAN1. Start a couple downloads, and they will be assigned to whichever WAN is least utilized (say both Netflix streams are running but one is SD the other is HD, the next connection would go through the lesser-utilized pipe containing the SD stream) - this happens in round-robin fashion, always putting new connections onto the least utilized WAN in the group..

So while any given connection will have a maximum of 60Mbps - since it doesn't split connections between the WAN ports you can't, say, download a single file at 120Mbps - you could have two 60Mbps connections downloading files at the same time. Failover/redundancy can be set up as a bonus.

And then again, this setup allows all devices to see each other, since they're all on the same LAN.

 

[Rhyseh]

Ubiquiti's ERL has the feature (load balancing) and a nice wizard to help configure it in the most recent firmware version. Depends on BW though, as the modify firewall rules that the device uses means it can't hardware offload the traffic, so for high throughput environments it might not be the go.

 

[taz420nj]

There's a few ways you could use pfSense, you could buy a preconfigured pfSense Appliance (about $500), you could buy an old WatchGuard Firebox x550e ($100 or less) and reconfigure it to use pfSense (that's what I am running) or buy one that has pfSense already installed ($150ish), or you could take an old computer and install a couple NICs and a lot of RAM into it and install pfSense (the cheapest way but does eat a lot of power compared to the appliance [7w] or the Firebox [25w]).