I have two internet connections at my place but the faster one is actually unreliable. 🙁
One is a broadband modem connected to PC via ethernet. The other one is a USB modem.
I would want to run both connections simultaneously (or parallel) in a way that even if one connection is down, I could fall back on the other one and access internet.
I would prefer a cheap (or free) software solution. I'm on Windows XP.
Update:
I understand that it can be achieved on Linux, but its a nightmare for people who are adept to MS Windows. Someone also suggested some kind of hardware load balancing but that's way expensive.
Okay, also let me know how do you cope with unreliable internet connections at work?
Update 2:
One of the answer mentions Channel Bonding and I realized that in dial up days some people managed to connect to multiple ISPs to increase bandwidth. But how???
Update 3:
Okay so this technique is called 'failover internet connections' and is possible. Apart from the solutions below, I found these two software pages:
Best Answer
I've tested dual-WAN on two ADSL2-connections and found out that the Linux solution was quite tricky to setup and it wasn't very reliable. I am now running PFSense on a old PC with 3 network cards. It was very simple to install, just boot the live-CD and connect LAN, WAN and OPT (second WAN) network cables to NICs when the installer asks. Then configuring the actual dual-WAN with failover was very simple, a guide can be found here:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi_WAN_/_Load_Balancing
If you don't want to use a dedicated PC for routing, I think it is possible to install PFSense on a VMWare (or similar) on your Windows XP and allow it to do the routing for you. This would ofcourse add some CPU overhead and use couple hundred megs of RAM.