ASUS RT-AC68U - Dual WAN Set Up

It has been three months since I started using ASUS RT-AC68U as my home router. I have set up DUAL WAN, Port forwarding, DDNS , AiDisc and AiCloud features. In this post I am going to walk you through dual WAN router settings. I am not going to cover the basic WAN settings as there are lot of posts which tells you hot to do it and also the Quick Settings wizard helps to easily set the router up and running for you. In this blog post, I am going to cover DUAL WAN which I like the most.

before setting up the DUAL WAN , make sure you have the latest firmware. the latest firmware as on Sep 04, 2014 is 3.0.0.4.376_1663. For some reason, the option provided in the Firmware page under "Administration" menu did not detect the latest firmware. you can manually download and install the latest firmware always from the ASUS support page RT-AC68U . It is always better to update the firmware as soon as the new version arrives.

DUAL WAN
       
             ASUS RT-AC68U supports dual wan. i.e you can connect two different ISP connection to the same router. In this case, the dedicated WAN port acts as one WAN port and you can configure any one of the four LAN ports or the USB port (which is used to connect 3G USB Modem) to be second WAN port. You have to set up one of these as Primary WAN and the other one as Secondary WAN. in my set up, I am using dedicated WAN port as Primary WAN and the LAN Port 1 as Secondary WAN.

To enable dual WAN option, Go to WAN settings page  and choose "Dual Wan" tab at the top.

here you can switch the Enable Dual WAN On and you can configure your WAN or one of the 4 LAN ports or the USB as primary wan , you can choose the secondary wan in the same way.


There are two options with which you can enable the dual wan

Fail over mode  - When the Primary WAN internet connection fails, the Secondary WAN kicks in and provides you with the uninterrupted internet connection (actually there is 30 - 60 secs delay before the Secondary WAN kicks in). "Allow Fallback" option allows the router to switch to Primary WAN as soon as it is up.

Load Balance mode  - when you choose this option, you can distribute the load between two WANs. i.e one request will use the primary WAN and the other request will use the secondary WAN. in this mode, you can also configure a particular device to use either Primary or Secondary WAN. for example, you can configure your laptop connected to your local network to use the primary WAN and the smart phone to use the secondary WAN always. when you choose this option, you get additional option to route requests through either primary or secondary WANs.

Look at the above settings carefully, by enabling routing rules and adding rules appropriately you can route the entire requests from a particular device through primary wan or secondary wan. In the above setup, my phone(192.168.1.61) uses secondary wan and my laptop (192.168.1.73) uses primary wan.

once you have set up the dual wan options, now its time to connect your second WAN cable to LAN Port 1 at the backside of the router and then use the "Internet Connection" tab to configure the primary WAN and secondary WAN connections.

In the "Internet Connection" page, use Wan type to choose the Primary WAN or Secondary WAN and enter the username/password details the same way you would set up a single WAN connection. make sure you click "Apply" before setting up the Secondary WAN. please know that when you switch the Primary and Secodary WAN connections in the Dual WAN settings page, it will just switch the WAN ports and not the user name/password associated with these connections and both the connections would fail. In this case, you have to again reconfigure Primary WAN and Secondary WAN settings in the "Internet Connection" tab.

once you set up the dual WAN, these changes will be reflected in the "Network Map" .

you can see both the Primary WAN and Secondary WAN are connected now. you can check if it is working by manually plugging out the Primary WAN cable and wait for sometime. the primary wan will go as disconnected first.

After a while you will see both Primary and Secondary as connected. It looks like this is a bug in this firmware version. when the secondary becomes active it shows both the primary and secondary wan status as connected and you cannot tell which one is really used by the router. you can verify which one is active by clicking on the Primary/Secondary WAN icon in network map and see the difference in assigned WAN IP. when the primary is disconnected and the secondary is active, you can see that assigned ip for both Primary and Secondary are same and this tells that Secondary WAN is used by the router.

 

 

my primary WAN is ACT broadband which uses Ethernet cable(RJ45) and my secondary WAN is ADSL which uses phone cable (RJ15). I had to convert the ADSL RJ15 to RJ45 to be able to connect to my router as secondary WAN since RT-AC68U does not have an ADSL port. I configured my old adsl modem in bridge mode and connected my modem's LAN output as Secondary WAN to RT-AC68U. I will walk through how to configure the ADSL modem in bridge mode in my next post. stay tuned.  

Please leave your questions in the comments section and let me know if you have any queries related to this router. 

ASUS RT-AC68U Wireless AC Router

Recently I got a ASUS RT-AC68U wireless router. it was around 230$ dollars when I bought it. I could have bought some low cost router but i thought ASUS RT-AC68U suits my requirement.

1. To have good wireless speeds.

2. wireless AC. right now I have three devices, two smartphones which can use AC and My laptop.
    soon I am planning to buy a smart tv and a tab soon which of course would support wireless AC so i wanted the router to be future proof somewhat.

3. Ability to remotely monitor my router settings and ability to do downloads directly via router.


My router configurations are as follows.

1. Internet - Primary WAN - ACT Broad band 25 mbps and Secondary WAN 8 mbps airtel in load         balance mode.

2.I have set up a DDNS provided by ASUS DDNS service.

3. Western Digital 1 TB external harddrive connected via usb 3.0 port to the router and I have set up a ftp server to access the files over internet.

4. AiCloud has been enabled to access the contents of the harddrive via mobile/browser.


Initially I had problems with setting up dual internet . My router was on firmware version 3.0.0.4.374.5656  after upgrading to the latest firmware 3.0.0.4.376.1663, I was able to setup dual WAN without any issues.

somehow ASUS did not automatically check and install the latest firmware and I had to do it manually. you can find the latest firmware here ASUS RT-AC68U .

since the secondary internet AIRTEL is ADSL line, we cannot directly connect this RJ15 type to the router. we have to use an ADSL modem and connect its output RJ45 to the RT-AC68U router. we can use the adsl modem in two ways, we can use it in bridge mode or we can use ppoe mode in adsl modem. it is better to use the bridge mode on adsl model and confgure the internet connection setup on the RT-AC68U router, this is very useful if we want to use DDNS. the other option is to use the ADSL modem with ppoe and configure the modem as DHCP server. for this option, you have to change the adsl modem's base address first so that it will not conflict with the RT-AC68U's address range. I will explain this in another post in detail. as of now I am using the second option for my adsl modem since my modem did not work in bridge mode.

my router has been top notch and I schedule my download tasks via my mobile app and when i get home i will have the movies ready to watch . :-). please leave your questions in the comments section, if you need any help with configuration. I am more than willing to help.
  stay tuned for my detailed walk through on dual WAN configuration and configuring ADSL connection to be used as a secondary internet with RT-AC68U.