Using DSL + WiMax Together

A few months ago, I signed up for Clear WiMax. I decided to keep my Bellsouth ADSL connection as I have received notices from Clear that my ‘unlimited’ connection was being over-utilized.

I tried to combine both ADSL and WiMax connections by putting a switch on the WAN port of my router and assigning static IPs to the two connections. By using route tables inside the router I was able to direct high-usage traffic over one connection and route all other traffic over the other. This works good- except that when I put both connections to static IPs, I create double-NATs and I run into issues when trying to open ports to internal systems:

Furthermore, after trying a few different Open-WRT firmware versions (Tomato, Gargoyle, DD-WRT) I found that routing inside my WRT54GL to not always work as I wanted it to.

After several failed attempts, I came up with another idea: I disabled DHCP on the WiMax modem, gave it a static IP on my local network and plugged it into the LAN side of my router:

I then added outbound static routes on my PC to all direct traffic for GigaNews and BackBlaze to the WiMax modem:

route add –p 70.42.186.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.5
route add –p 70.42.243.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.5
route add –p 205.11.107.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.5
route add –p 216.196.96.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.5

These routes direct all outbound traffic for my blackblaze client (70.42.186.0/24, 70.42.243.0/24 and 205.11.107.0/24) and GigaNews (216.196.96.0/24) over the WiMax connection. All other traffic is passed to the default gateway and out to BellSouth.

I am using NetLimiter to monitor my bandwidth usage and restricting GigaNews downloads to about 6Mbps in NewsLeecher (I can still remove the cap and jump up to about 9Mbps if I an in a hurry for a specific article)- which appears to have stopped the ‘excessive usage’ emails/calls from Clear support.

On other hosts on my network I can leave Bellsouth as default or add the above routes if I want to connect in a similar manner.

I was also having some strange issues with the Gargoyle firmware was not automatically connecting via PPPoE, but the latest firmware and setting my MTU to 1500 appears to have resolved this.

On another note: the WiMax connection does not appear to be an asymmetrical connection; on my Bellsouth ADSL line, my download bandwidth decreases as my upload bandwidth is utilized- this is not the case with WiMax.

Now I am able to access a cumulative 12Mbps down/1Mbps up on my PC. In theory, I could break out the WiMax mobile and connect it to a 3G router and have a 3rd route- but I am not going to push my luck too much with Clear… :)

DSL Outage and D-Link DGL-4500

I awoke this morning to a terrible revelation- my Internet was down!

I did the normal basic trouble-shooting before calling BellSouth- who was equally confused as to what was happening. After a little research I determined that I was not getting DNS resolution. I immediately thought this was a BellSouth issue, but I finally discovered a new ‘feature’ in my D-Link DGL-4500 router.

There is an ‘Enable Advanced DNS Service’ option in the ‘Manual Configure’ page of my Internet settings page":

Checking this box over-rides the ISPs DNS server settings and changes them to:

204.194.232.200
204.194.234.200

If these servers are not responding (as is the case this morning), all DNS lookups fail and web pages/other services can only be reached by IP address.

Unchecking this box allows the router to use the default BellSouth DNS Servers:

205.152.37.23
205.152.150.23

I am not sure if this ‘feature’ was added in the latest v1.20 firmware (that I installed yesterday) or if this was an old feature and the servers went down during the night….

DSL Modem Option 3: TRENDNet TEW-635BRM

The NetGear routers do not provide port translation; the LinkSys routers are ‘feature poor’; my DLink is having 802.11b/n issues… So I decided to try out a TRENDnet TEW-635BRM.

The TRENDnet seemed to be a viable alternative; it has an integrated DSL modem, Wireless N, QoS and WPS- and it does both port forwarding and port translation!

However it does not do DHCP reservations… The is not specifically a ‘deal-killer’ but I am fairly OCD on my network settings and not having my PC at 192.168.10.100 may be just enough to drive me insane…

TRENDnet was even go good as to put a router emulator on their site for testing.

I will play with this device for bit more, but I have the strong feeling that I will be re-flashing my DGL-4500 and going back to the old DSL modem…