Hi,

I wonder if anybody would like to offer some advice?

I have a 2820 as my main broadband router. It has DHCP switched on, and I use a Comtrend Mains adapter to provide connectivity to my TV which needs access to both the internet, and also my home network for streaming purposes.

I am getting Sky Broadband on my second phone line which will connect to my SkyHD box for their Anytime+ service. The location of this router will be where my TV is.

I'm looking to see if there are any options to connect the two networks that would yield some extra benefit?

As it stands, I can think of three scenarios, but I don't know whether they would work as I suggest:

1. Keep everything separate. The Sky Broadband would only be used by the SkyHD box.

2. Use the Comtrend boxes to connect the Sky Broadband router to the 2820 via one of the regular network ports. If I turn off DHCP on the Sky Router, and manually set the IP details to use it as the gateway on the SkyHD box, then (I think) the SkyHD box will use Sky Broadband to get to the internet. I could plug the TV into the Sky Router, and I could optionally set it to use that box as the gateway for internet streaming purposes, but it would still be able to participate on my home network. The other advantage is that I would be able to access and administer the Sky Router from my home network.

3. Use the Comtrend boxes to connect the Sky Broadband router to the 2820 via the WAN port. I *think* this would provide the opportunity for fail over (not bothered about that) but also load balancing (which sounds good, but would that be of much benefit? I wouldn't want to configure separate IP routes, but if I were downloading two things at once, it would be nice if it could use different broadband providers to double the effective speed). However, I'm not sure that if the TV, if plugged into the Sky Router would be able to participate on the home network in this scenario?

Hopefully, that explains the situation - can anybody offer advice or suggestions how I might best maximise the benefit of having a second Broadband connection whilst still connecting my TV to the home network?

Cheers,

Steve.

The Sky broadband isn't live yet (scheduled for today), but I've tried the configurations I've labelled as 2 and 3. Until the Sky is live, I can't test the manual setting of the gateway to provide internet access, but I am pretty certain that the connecting of the Sky router to the WAN connection of the 2820 doesn't permit devices connected to the Sky box to participate on the same network, which means that option 3 is a non-starter.

I suppose there is an option 4. If I were to connect the 2820 to the Sky router via both the network AND the WAN port at the same time, would that work? If I were to put a hub at the end of the Comtrend link, then I could have one port connected to the LAN side, and one port connected to the WAN.

Does anybody have any views on whether any of this would work?

Also, can anybody point me to a setup guide that would ensure that I can set up the 2820 so that the load balancing would work properly. I'm assuming I would set up a static IP (presumably with the WAN details), but I'm not sure if the Sky broadband will have a fixed ip or not?

Cheers,

Steve.

if you could co-locate the sky router next to the 2820 you could use the comtrend back to a switch near the TV and HD box and get the benefits of load balancing and failover.

also, taking option 3 forward, you might be able to connect TV to the sky router and set firewall rules on the 2820 to allow the TV IP address route to your lan streaming source

For anybody that might be interested, or stumble across this in the future, I did manage to get varying levels of success running the LAN and WAN connections into a switch, and using the uplink of that switch through the Comtrend boxes to the Sky Router. Everything ALMOST worked in that all the boxes could see each other, but the load balancing didn't work at all (however, the failover did. However, as soon as the 2820's ADSL connection came up, then nothing was routed to the Sky Router).

My final solution was to use a second set of Comtrend connectors, and configured it "properly". One set provides the WAN link from the 2020 to the Sky Router, and the other set provides a link from the TV back to the 2820 (the SkyHD box just plugged straight into the Sky Router). The fact that there are two sets of Comtrends running on my single mains supply doesn't seem to have any detremental effect, and I've now got load balancing with all the boxes being able to see whatever they are meant to see.

I hope this helps somebody in the future.

Cheers,

Steve.