I have cable and dsl internet in my home. Ideally, I'd like to have a setup where if one connection drops I am automatically switched to the second connection, with minimum downtime in terms of lost internet. This is primarily for internet poker.

Is there a wired router, to which I can connect both DSL and Cable, and my computer, which would ensure that if one of the internet signals drops I am immediately back in action playing off of the second ISP?

Yes. Just google dual wan router.

tyvm! So something like this should work: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833124160 ?

Yup. That should do it.

If you plan to use to router just for the dual wan aspect then that model is more than adequate. If you also plan to use the router for setting up your LAN and you work with a lot of large files then you'd probably want to get something a little better. I would also read some reviews as even though Cisco stuff is usually great I'd still want to know what people think of this particular router.

the manual for that family of routers indicates that it includes "network service detection" which determines whether or not either WAN connection is still viable by pinging "specified devices". the default configuration is such that it will only fail over after 5 missed pings at 30 second intervals. so fail-over would take 2.5mins at default settings. it doesn't say what the "specified devices" are that it's pinging, so i'm not sure how often you could ping them in order to lower the total fail-over time while not getting blocked and also not failing over excessively (for brief blips, etc). you'll have to investigate further and/or trial and error test it.

edit for clarity: the default settings may actually be for the router to load balance traffic. keeping it this way should cause you issues with any secure connections. what i talked about above are the default settings after switching the configuration to the mode supporting fail-over.

You should be able to install a second network card and plug into both sources.

i don't believe there's a way to have that automatically fail over unless there's some software out that will continuously ping outside addresses and alter your PC's routing table when an outage is detected.

I'm not sure if windows would do it automatically, but you could always disable the primary NIC in the device manager. But then I guess you could do the same by running two ethernet cables to your location and unplug the dead one / plug in the good one!

Hi guys, im popping this old thread because I have the same problem. Internet is very bad here and don't know what to do, I bought the rv042 mentioned above and the response time it's not very good (1-3mins) so need another solution, anyone?

what do you mean by "response time"? if you mean the time that it takes the router to detect that one of the connections has gone down, there is/are option(s) to adjust that (see my post in #5 above). you'll have to tweak with the settings to achieve the best solution for your situation.