Network Crossover - good idea or not

Hi Community,

Moved our office recently and we have set up 2 incoming internet lines - one for the internet (pc's) and one for the VOIP phones - fairly standard practice i guess.

We have experienced a few drop outs on both lines but it effects the VOIP phones more.

Both set-ups are the same Router > Switch > Device therefore i wondered if I ran a ethernet cable between both switches if there was ever a drop in the line the device would switch too the other.

Now i know there are routing issues for e.g. sharing docs on a network but apart from that which i could overcome with a cloud drive is there anything else?

I am working with the ISP to get the internet sorted!

I don't have any personal experience with it, but I'm guessing that it won't work like that. If you connected the two switches, downstream clients would have two DHCP servers upstream (one from each router) that would probably compete to get IP assignments. Maybe the devices are smart enough that they would continue working, but I'm not sure.

Are you sure the intermittent connection issues are from the ISP's end? Perhaps you've got some shoddy wiring at the NID or something, or in the walls?

I respect your point, therefore if it was a wiring issue i guess i would need to plug another wire in to try the connection?

I've been meaning to chime into this one for a bit...

I'd need more info with regards to your setup. It looks as though you have completely seperate networks, eg seperate switch for phones as for PCs, same with the upstream routers. But I don't know what HW you're using. Is this SOHO unmanaged or are you using managed devices?

The short answer is this, in order to have one fail over to another, you need to get some dynamic routing in play. Yeah, if it's a simple enough setup, static routes may work, but that also depends again on what you're using. In addition, you would need to have some QoS in play as well, otherwise, if both sides end up on one network, your PCs could knock out your phones, though YMMV depending on the HW in use and bandwidth between devices.

If using off the shelf SOHO gear, this looks to me like it's a manual failover scenario. I've not played with static routes on these kinds of devices, so adding a default route with a higher metric and having it apply automatically when its primary route disappears...one would assume it would work, but I've not tested it. Also, it depends on what that router is pointing to for its default gateway.