Help With Load Balancing

I know this should probably go in the Internet section, but this category is more popular and it does concern hardware :p


So I have a couple hacked cable modems, allowing me to run more than one connection at a time in my home, also faster. (30/3 as apposed to the 6/1 they limit me to)

I wanted to know the best way to go about balancing over up the 5 modems. Feel a little ashamed having completed a well know networking company's course at my college. But its been some time since completing it and have had little practice on the subject.

Want to keep my wireless N going of course. Should I:

1. Setup a seperate pc to handle all the connections and act as a router
2. Run load balancing on my Windows Home Server and have everything routed through that (have heard u can load balance)
3. Get a router I can run DD-WRT on. I know that firmware can dual-wan but can it handle a WAN on more than 2 ports?
4. Get a Cisco router and somehow configure it to work how I want

Of course im trying to do this on a budget. Thanks for any advice!

I don't know a great deal about what you are trying to do, but I can make a few suggestions about what to ignore, and what to search for.

Your second option regarding Windows Home Server is more about spreading the load of incoming connections to more than one PC. In fact the whole concept of Load Balancing is more along those lines so using that as your search entry will probably give you misleading results.

I think the proper term for what you are talking about is WAN aggregation.

I'm fairly confident that a Cisco router could do what you want, but a solution with 5 WAN ports is likely to be very expensive.

I can't see any way that a DD-WRT capable router is going to help - at best they would have dual ports. As with the Cisco anything more than that is going to be expensive.

That really only leaves you with your first option. Other than the Cisco option this was always going to be the case because you need a single point of reference which sees all of the traffic in order to be able to direct the flow efficiently.

My idea on this would probably be a PC with sufficient ports to run all the WAN connections, plus one for the internal connection to your home PC(s). I can't envisage a low-cost solution using a Windows system, so my suggestion would be a Linux box.