I have a Draytek Vigor 2860ac with two VDSL WAN connnections: one is Zen Internet with unlimited data, and the other A&A ISP with limited data, but lower ping times.

I want to use the A&A connection to serve gaming (and potentially anything else that needs low latency) and keep all the heavy traffic, streaming downloads etc on the Zen connection. Does anyone have any suggestions for a smart way to go about this?

The simple approach would be to assign the gaming devices a fixed IP on the LAN and route all traffic from them over A&A, whilst Zen is the default for all other IPs on the network. But of course gaming PCs do big downloads too, so how to make downloads or streaming from the gaming PCs run over the Zen connection?

Btw, I have configured A&A as failover for when Zen goes down and want to keep that of course.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

You may try the Load-Balance/Route Policy (in Routing menu). 1
1. set the "destination" as your gaming server domain/IP or specify the destination port, and choose interface as your A&A ISP
2. set the 2nd policy, from Any source to Any destination go via Zen, and this will make sure all other traffics go via Zen.

What are the "big downloads" that the gaming PCs do? Are you talking about things like Windows updates?

You could set those to be manually applied, and manually change to the Zen connection as required. Otherwise, I don't see how you can distinguish non-gaming traffic from gaming traffic in order to decide which WAN they should connect through?

JohnGalt wrote:
You may try the Load-Balance/Route Policy (in Routing menu). 1
1. set the "destination" as your gaming server domain/IP or specify the destination port, and choose interface as your A&A ISP
2. set the 2nd policy, from Any source to Any destination go via Zen, and this will make sure all other traffics go via Zen.

Initially I'd sort of dismissed this because it will need a rule for each game and possibly more than one per game (if there are many different servers, which I think is often the case), but when I think about it perhaps that won't be so bad as there are not so many games that are so latency sensitive. I'll look into this - thank you!

Piste Basher wrote:
What are the "big downloads" that the gaming PCs do? Are you talking about things like Windows updates?

You could set those to be manually applied, and manually change to the Zen connection as required. Otherwise, I don't see how you can distinguish non-gaming traffic from gaming traffic in order to decide which WAN they should connect through?

I'm primarily thinking about game files. They are huge. 100 GB is not unheard of. What you are suggesting is kind of my basic approach which I was hoping to improve on.

If there was a way to "switch" WAN connections easily from the client PC this approach would be much more palatable. Maybe using a VPN (although that seems like a complicated sledgehammer to crack a nut)?

The quickest way on client I can think of is have two network connections (network cards are cheap as chips), setup policy route for each ip to go over different wans then quickly disable the connection on the PC you dont want use when you game.
Not ideal but trying to policy route all the destination IP's etc will be endless task.