Rationalising Network Hardware

Well, as luck would have it on a day when I am working from home the ADSL router modem bites the dust but fortunately I had a couple of 3G connections as backup. The trusty old Dynalink RTA1025Wjust couldn’t manage to sync up to the exchange anymore and would have pushed at least a couple of terabytes of data during its lifetime.

Anyway, I couldn’t afford to lament on the death of the Dynalink modem so after a quick spot of research I picked up a Billion BiPAC 7800DXL router modem (AKA Triple-WAN Dual-Band Wireless-N 600Mbps 3G/4G LTE ADSL2+/Fibre Broadband Router). Stay tuned for an unboxing video 🙂

I selected this router modem as I had three devices serving network traffic, specifically:

  1. the old Dynalink mode,
  2. a Linksys WRT54GL Wi-Fi router,
  3. a Linksys WRT600N Wi-Fi router.

It was getting a bit messy in the corner of the room with lots of cables for power and data so I thought I’d replace them all with one box which cemented my choice. However, I will need to put in a gigabit network switch as the four ports on the back of the router modem won’t be enough to hook everything up but I am trying to get as many devices as possible on the 802.11n 5GHz band.

It’s also been a good activity to revisit the static IP addressing on the network as I have had a few stale entries for devices no longer possessed as well as some of the port forwarding rules.

One thing that I am keen to check out in this router modem is the ipv6in4 tunnel capabilities so stay tuned for an update on how that goes as well. It’ll also be cool to setup a redundant 3G connection to take over when the ADSL connection ever falters.

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