[OPLINTECH] Load balance free Road Runner?

[Philip Robinette]

Greetings,

Our local Time Warner Cable divisions have generously provided free modems and residential Road Runner high speed Internet service to our main library and one branch.  (They did not come to us, but readily installed it when we formally asked).  A panel at the last Stakeholders Meetings covered the use of commercial broadband and VPN tunnels from branches to main libraries and catalogs.  Wes Osborn also mentioned using a Checkpoint firewall to load balance his main library's T1 and business-class Road Runner.  Is any one else doing this for redundancy and increased bandwidth?  Does anyone have DAS load balance another ISP on the main library router (if that's possible)?

Can anyone recommend any of the new cheap dual WAN hardware that is becoming available, to either supplement or replace our single WAN port firewall?  A brief survey shows everything from a Hawking router for $55 to enterprise-class load balancers from Radware and F5 for many thousands.  We need to route some traffic to OARnet for IP authentication, a capability the cheaper devices lack.  Policy-based NAT and antivirus scanning would also be nice.  But our current budget probably limits us to the low $1000 range.  Does anyone have experience with Netgear, D-Link, Xincom, Hotbrick, or others?

Alternatively, we could use Road Runner for a completely separate network, for a wireless hotspot perhaps.  But that seems like a waste of bandwidth, albeit free.

Thank you for any thoughts,

Philip Robinette
Franklin Public Library

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