Duolinks SW24 2PORT Dual Wan Load Balancing Router

It's hard to find a load balancing router for a smaller business that is simple and easy to integrate into the network, provides security and the necessary backup connectivity that is beneficial to a business without breaking the bank. Recently, we purchased the Duolinks SW24 2PORT Dual Wan Load Balancing Router for less than $140. It was promptly delivered and easy to setup right out of the box. We didn't have to call in a "pro" to integrate the unit into our network. Basically, over 95% of the work our business processes require internet connectivity through portals and websites. We need a solid router that provides security as well as uninterrupted internet connectivity. This router does the job. We're using it with cable and DSL. The unit easily balances our traffic across these connections. During the few months it has been in service, at least one of the connections has had trouble or failed but with the router in place, it was a seamless blip that did not impact our business. The unit "failed over" to the active connection without interrupting the network. The router is easily configured through a browser interface and has many different functions we are still learning and utilizing. It provides a good firewall for security as well as the ability to block inappropriate traffic. We're extremely happy with our choice and look forward to learning more about the router and its capabilities. All this makes it extremely affordable for the home or small to medium business that doesn't need the complicated Cisco routers and the highly paid contractors needed to install and maintain them.

I bought this router for our small office... we depend heavily on reliable internet connectivity, and have incoming cable (primary, DHCP) and DSL (backup, PPPoE) connections. Setup was fairly straightforward (I'm no networking expert, but have set up 8 or 10 other routers), and we were up and running in under an hour. I didn't use load balancing, because our cable is much, much faster than the DSL... we'd rather just use that whenever it's available, and failover to the DSL only when the cable goes down. The SW24 seemed to handle link "health checks" and automatic failover just fine. Where we had problems though was on more mundane NAT routing functionality. We had frequent dropped SSL connections and browsing failures (IE "cannot load the page"). Invariably, these were momentary failures, and a browser refresh (or re-logging in to secure sites) would immediately succeed... but when it happens on an hourly basis to multiple users, it's just not tolerable. Syswan tech support was responsive and helpful, and we determined that it was most likely related to a DNS caching problem in the SW24. Passing internet DSN servers (openDNS or Level3) to our DHCP clients (instead of just giving them the router's 192.168.1.1 address as the only DNS server) reduced the frequency of dropped connections, but didn't solve the problem. Tech support suggested a new/beta firmware that allows the router's internal DNS caching to be disabled. This firmware was supposed to be emailed to me, but wasn't, and I decided I was tired of messing with it. So after fooling with this router and tolerating unstable internet connectivity for several weeks, I gave up, returned the SW24, and bought a Peplink 20L. Peplink just worked straight out of the box... much happier with it. Obviously others have had better luck with this router, but for whatever reason, it didn't work reliably in our situation.

I am an avid flight sim guy and frequently upload my flights to YouTube. The following is a reply to Marshall regarding his upload practices. [...] Marshall, As always, I greatly enjoy your flights and commentary… I miss the unique NewYouwk camaraderie I enjoyed during the eleven years my wife and I lived on the West side…across the street from the Dakota and later at 326 W 48th…don't ask…ok, you can , with my YouTube prefix and @gmail.com….grin… and To you, and by now, your 1200 plus subscribers, I submit the following for comment. I wondered, since your terrific vids tend to go lengthy, how do you manage during your video upload time? What is your; 1. Upload speed, and; 2. Video capture tool , and 3. Your editing /compilation/output tool? With my rig, I7-6700K/GTX 1080 MSI Killer Ethernet MOBO, uploading anything of significant length takes a piss-offable amount of time. I; 1. record with Shadowplay, 2. edit/output via MovieMaker's standard 1920x1080 savea to PC option, then; 3. drag and drop to Chrome's YouTube upload page. Though MovieMaker, gives me pretty nice ~50% reduction over the already outstanding Shadowplay file size, my Time Warner (17 Mb down, 1Mb upload speed) , upload of Two hours of video , can take upwards of 14 hours. Believe me, I have tried virtually ALL paid and free Vid capture tools, and nothing has given me the frame-rate friendliness/quality/file size combo of Shadowplay. I say Piss-offable because during upload, I experience a huge loss of internet download quality / speed. I have read this loss is due to the necessary handshaking with YouTube thus making at least Downloads or Video streaming viewing during this upload time, totally suck-worthy. Therefore, I try to minimize the suck time by uploading during sleeping hours. Nonetheless, I don't sleep 14-18 hours, so I still have to contend with 4-8 hours of internet s***y-time. What am I doing wrong? I do have; 1. a Windstream DSL 3/1.5 Mb dl/up backup, and; 2. a LAN connected multimedia laptop in the home theater(Living room), and; 3. a load balancing SysWan SW24 2 WAN port router to plaza and y with and; 4. plenty of time. I was thinking that I could; 1. compile the Moviemaker output on my faster flying machine, then; 2. transfer the file via LAN to my multimedia laptop, then; 3. upload FROM MY LAPTOP through my DSL connection to YouTube... thus; 4. AUTOmagically switching, based on IP address, via my SW24, my Flying/editing machine to the freed-Up TW 17/1 connection for other multi media events and downloads and goodies... ...at least that's the theory...with no tech support and sketchy documentation, the Sw24 setup is a non-trivial issue. N.B. I am now experimenting, with the last several vids, my recent discovery of Moviemaker’s Vimeo 1920 x 1080 option. It gives me; 1. Two-thirds(66%) reduction in output file size over the standard “save to PC” option, and ; 2. correspondingly 66% reduction in upload time to YouTube. 3. The downside is rare-occasional video schmutz, but; 4. The upside, is a huge increase of download_speed/quality_of_video_stream_watching-during_waking_hours time-… …even if the SW24 experiment is a bust. Sending healing vibes to your back. Chas

We had previously run off of cable successfully for about a year. After network "upgrades" allowing for higher tiered speeds in our area, the connection started getting worse and worse. When the cable company ignored our requests for help, we decided to get DSL as well. After factoring in the costs of DSL plus several phone lines we needed we eventually just went with a T1. Our work is 95% online, and the requirement for a stable connection is critical. We run a lot of applications that require reliable / consistent access to the internet or the whole application must start over, even with the best way this could be coded we are doing a lot of custom things here that can't overcome the other end's policies / protocols. Overall, this router has served us well enough for the price. It is highly reliable within how it does operate. Our cable line is 12Mbps / 2Mbps (Go figure it has worked perfectly since the installation of our T1). The T1 is 1.5Mbps / 1.5Mbps The load balancing certainly has its shortcomings, particularly in a setting where the speeds between the two connections are so drastically different. Lets say you want to "download all big files" from the cable, there is no option to do any thing. This could be accomplished by setting protocols to be used on certain servers, or for certain file extensions to be used on the cable - There is no option such as setting "Use FTP only on WAN 2" or "Use URLs containing .zip, .exe, .rar, etc on WAN 2". You can set only the amount of connections that are open between the two, or transferred / received bytes to be balance. So, if you download a big file on one connection, it will favor the other WAN port all day long until the load has evened out between the two. Some applications just plain don't support connections going out from multiple IPs either, so they will marginally work, or not at all (Take for instance my personal hobby is Chess, and I share a lot of that data over eMule P2P client). In the end, we set it to use the T1 100% of the time. If the T1 does go down, it does (almost seamlessly) switch over to using the cable line, this is both by straight packet / data loss or by the connection being physically unplugged. There is some manipulation possible, such as switching the load over 100% to the WAN 2 port, start downloading a large file, then switch it back 100% to WAN 1. This will continue the download on the second port. I put a shortcut to the router in my browser so this is just a click or two away. One simple and great feature I wish it had would be to say such-and-such local IP uses WAN 2, while all the rest use WAN 1. This would be great so you could have cable-bandwidth while needing to download files on one PC, but all other PCs on the network would continue to use WAN 1 seamlessly. The router does require a HTTPS in front of the router IP, not HTTP, which confused me for a little bit having not read the manual beforehand - Hopefully that comment can save you a little wasted time. In the end, it is lacking many possible features that could make it much more robust. It is good for redundancy and on-the-fly changing of which connection you are using without ever leaving your desk. Other reviews note VPN problems, we have no need for VPN so keep that in mind as well. For an office only accessing web based data, you are probably going to be perfect setting the load to 50/50 and going with it despite all my above comments. If you do anything outside of what your mom would do on the internet, expect some fumbling around to figure out what works best for you personally.

When I received the unit, I plugged in my two ISP connections from the modems into the Duolinks SW24 Dual Wan Load Balancing Router. http://www.amazon.com/Duolinks-SW24-2PORT-Balancing-Router/dp/B0012ZQ0GA/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1345376619&sr=1-1&keywords=Duolinks+SW24+2PORT+Dual+Wan+Load+Balancing+Router My Atlantic Broadband ISP connected immediately; however, my ATT Uverse did not. After trying to figure out the proper setup on my own with no luck, I called Syswan Technologies Support. There was no answer, but I did get a message. I left my name, call back number and short description of the problem. No one called me back after a couple of days, so I called back again. Same - no answer - leave a message and after a couple of days no one called me back. I e-mailed support, but there was no response. I decided to call the sales number and did get someone on the phone. However, this was a call service that takes messages. I told the person my problem, they apologized and said someone would get back to me. I did get an e-mail with instructions, but they didn't work. I e-mailed Syswan support back with more information. No one got back to me. I called the support line again, but again the message to leave my information. No one called me back. I called the sales number again and a very nice lady apologized and promised that support would get back to me. I told her about the prior e-mail and explained that if a support person could get on the phone with me I believe that we could get the ATT Uverse connected. It's been well over a week and no one from Syswan Technologies has called me or e-mailed me. I have experienced slow tech support with other companies, but I have never experienced no support. A company that ignores it's customers cannot stay in business very long. This product most likely works if you can get it configured, but if you think you will need any support - based on my experience - do not buy this product.

Got great pricing on two separate bandwidth connections through Telecom Brokers and installing this unit we now get to use both of our connections all of the time! We have both a T1 and a Cable connection and have them both connected to this unit now. I played with the various load balancing modes and balancing by session seemed to work best for me so far with packets flowing in the same session with the same internet service provider. Balancing by bytes gave the worst performance and balancing by packets was about in the middle. I have not tried to balance by IP address and not sure if that would be better or worse. Overall a great value and cost effective way to make sure your business stays connected. After I ordered this unit and went online I saw some of the other models that SYSWAN also makes and might have got a more expensive model if I knew before I ordered, but this one seems to work fine. I would be interesting to compare the different models side by side and what results someone would get. Would like to hear feedback about that if someone does it.

I do not want to take too much time writing this review, but my SW24 worked for a few months then started getting a blinking light error. This particular blinking light error was described in the manual which said to contact technical support. I tried for three weeks to contract technical support with multiple phone calls and emails. Well I have heard nothing. I ended up buying the peplink balance 20. It is amazing! I got it working out of the box in minutes to my particular situation. The health checks actually work as well. do yourself a favor, pay a little more and get a much user friendly product!

Maybe I need to double check my spam folder--but I wrote to them on the website and got no answer. I have an ISDN modem and a cable modem and I was excited to get this and load balance the two services. I carefully followed all the instructions and reboot the computer so that this router could assign addresses. Nothing. When I get a chance to stop my workaholic schedule to spend a few hours troubleshooting this for the manufacturer I'll do it. Until then I'm disappointed it doesn't work out of the box.