For his home business, my father wanted 2 separate internet connections: one from Rogers, and one from Aliant. This is great for bandwidth, but it poses a problem when trying to network computers using Aliant with others using Rogers. I couldn’t find too much information about this on the internet, so I figured I’d outline how I got it working.

Things you’ll need:

  • 2 routers. It’s not necessary for them to be identical, but it makes things easier. I used 2 Linksys WRT54G routers.
  • 2 modems. I had a DSL modem from Aliant, and a cable modem from Rogers.

The first step is to get each router set up independently and connected to their respective ISPs. Connect all the computers to the correct routers (This depends on which computers you want accessing which ISP). You’ll have to assign a distinct IP for each computer between 192.168.1.100 and 192.168.1.150. You can’t use the same IP on 2 computers or you’ll get a conflict once we connect the two routers.

Rather than letting each computer get its network settings via DHCP, we need to specify them manually. If you don’t do this, all of the computers will always get the gateway IP of the router with DHCP enabled, and never the other one. This means that you’ll have one ISP that is never getting used.

Next you’ll have to change the IP on one of the routers so they won’t conflict with each other. By default, the WRT54G has an IP of 192.168.1.1. Change the IP on one of the routers to 192.168.1.2. These are your gateway IPs.

Since we changed the IP of one of the routers, we’re going to have to change the gateway IP in the network settings of each computer connected to that router to 192.168.1.2 before they can access the internet again.

Next, on one router, turn off the DHCP server. Even though you’re manually assigning IPs to your network, there may be an occasion where you want DHCP (laptops for example). You need to decide which ISP you want DHCP-assigned computers to access because you won’t be able to specify a gateway manually and get an IP via DHCP on Windows at the same time.

Now you need some way for the two routers to talk to each other. That’s easy. Just connect the two via an ethernet cable from port 1 on router 1 to port 1 on router 2 (the ports aren’t important as long as the WAN ports are used for your modems).

That’s it. All of the computers on router 1 and 2 should now be on the same network. If you want a computer to access a different ISP, you just have to change the gateway IP in your networks settings to the other router’s IP.

This might have seemed a bit complicated, but once you do it, it’s pretty simple.