combining 2 broadband connections

[wpublic]

i have a pretty well established network on a broadband cable internet connection with cable modem to a linksys router (befsr41) with a couple computers directly connected to the router and an uplink to a larger switch that has all the rest of the network.

i also have a dsl connection as a backup that runs straight from the modem to 1 computer.

i eventually want to add some more to this network and bridge them to the main network; i know a few ways to do it, i am just wondering if i am gonna have problems.

my main goal is to share internet bandwidth across the both networks, but on occasion 1 system is used for online gaming and during that time if bandwidth happens to be maxed out, that system can take priority (like QoS)

should i put a router(i have WRT54g) or a switch on the dsl network? if i put the router, i was planning on giving it the ip 192.168.1.50 and LAN DHCP disabled, all computers have static addresses. i had it kind of like this before on the same network and i was occasionally having to power cycle the main router to get back the connection. if i used the above router, then i would be able to set a port high priority in QoS settings.

i was also thinking of running that network 192.168.2.xxx, would that work better?

also, would this setup work better in a workgroup or win domain?

any thoughts or suggestions are welcomed.

[FlyingPenguin]

You can't just share two broadband connections on the same network without some special hardware.

You need a dual WAN router. Also known as load balancing routers although TRUE load balancing routers for commercial use are very expensive.

You need something like this: http://www.superwarehouse.com/p.cfm?p=3 ... MP=KA18442

[DoPeY5007]

I had DSL and cable and used the nextlan dual WAN router, you could set it so one is set to only use the one of the connections, and it would balance the rest.

It was a fun toy

[wpublic]

thanks. i like the way that looks; i'll check it out.

[rndmtask]

I'd figure some way to do it with linux. The only problem I see is how to make it really balanced. You could easily have both plugged into a linux box and have it route through each one depending on what kind of packet it its. Say games can go out the DSL and everything else the cable modem. Doing this in some sort of random way may be difficult though, but hey its open source so....

[TheSovereign]

u can multiplex t1's but that cost mucho