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I have four separate LAN Internet connections that I would like to connect to a computer server to redistribute as one connection to five rooms, and would also like to have wireless access points.

My Internet connection is coming from four separate LAN cables. I want to redistribute my connection as one combined connection to several devices.

I have:

  • TP-link 8-port splitters
  • Wireless access points
  • A customizable PC that I would like to use as the server.

What is the nature of the equipment required to accomplish this? (switch/router/other..)
How do I need to do this? (Connect this/that/etc..)

Also, I think I need to get several LAN cards to connect all my Internet connections to my PC. How many LAN cards do I need?

  • Is it five? Four for inputs and one for output?
  • Or is there another way I can connect them by using one LAN card and a switch or router or something?
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    I think such kind of networking topology will always be ambiguous if you try to explain it just in a couple of lines. I definitely suggest for you to add any scheme. You can do it easily using some diagram editor like yED (yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html), open source and including computer cliparts for what you need.
    – Sopalajo de Arrierez
    Commented Feb 10, 2014 at 0:53

3 Answers 3

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You need to configure the customisable PC as a router.
The easiest way to do this would be to grab one of the prebuilt router *Nix distributions like PFSense as that will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. The distribution will have load balancing features that you will need to utilise to balance the connections across the 4 internet connections

You will need to have a look at the router distribution's documentation to determine how to setup the load balancing.

The PC will need 5 NICs to be able to connect to all of the connections.
4 NICs will connect to the separate internet connections, and the 5th will connect to your home network. Normally this would go into a switch.

Here's a list of router distributions to get you started. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_and_firewall_distributions

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  • Thank you for the help, I have one more question: My 5th NIC will connect to the main switch, should I connect the rest of my Access points and switches into it? And How many devices do you think I can handle with this setup?
    – ThaBomb
    Commented Feb 10, 2014 at 12:43
  • Yes, connect everything else to the Main Switch. You can handle a lot. I have 17 ? devices hanging off a similar setup, except I only have 1 internet connection.
    – Lawrence
    Commented Feb 11, 2014 at 4:19
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I wouldn't use a regular PC as a 24x7 router. It's very likely to fail sooner or later, and your electric bill will probably be huge.

I'd go for a multi WAN router (they're expensive) or get a regular router that supports OpenWRT. TP-Links are good and unexpensive.

OpenWrt ​is a highly extensible ​GNU/​Linux ​distribution for embedded devices ​(typically wireless routers).

The package that provides this functionality in OpenWRT is called mwan3.

Mwan3 is a package that simplifies the usage of more (up to 250) WAN interfaces in OpenWRT.

To setup mwan3 on OpenWRT:

  • First you need to get a supported device. You can see a list of supported devices in the OpenWRT page.
  • Replace the stock firmware with the proper OpenWRT image for that device.
  • Install mwan3 package via built-in package manager on the webadmin.
  • Reboot the device.
  • Choose the networks to be used for internet access via webadmin setup.
  • Choose the loadbalancing policy.
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  • Please consider that certain links could possibly not work in a country. Would you be so kind to include the most critical steps from the link into your answer.
    – rrobben
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 9:27
  • @RamonRobben Not sure why my answer was downvoted :( but tried adding information to improve it. Thank you for your advice.
    – Mariano Wadel
    Commented Apr 1, 2017 at 18:29
  • Links only are not a good asnwer. it probably was downvoted because of that reason. Remember when making an answer that the OP only has access to this website.
    – rrobben
    Commented Apr 2, 2017 at 19:29
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Another option is to use a pepwave WAN balancing router. It will balance traffic across all 4 internet connections, while providing failover protection as well.

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