TL-R4299G Dual WAN Router for Internet Café

Constant uninterruptable internet services for some businesses today is becoming a demand in supporting the continuity of the businesses. Having an infrastructure which supports the business class features including the router with fail-over and load balancing capability is a must for businesses that demands the uninterruptable internet services. With fail-over feature, when the primary connection fails, the system will fail-over to the backup connection.

For small businesses which demand affordable business class router with multi-WAN feature and load balancing capability as well as easy to manage is very important. The router should be able to distribute the loads not just concentrated to a particular line, but distribute to all the available lines possible in load balancing manner. You can consider TP-Link TL-R4299G – an affordable small business class router with dual WAN ports and supports the fail-over and load balancing. Does it meet to your business needs?

What this Product Does

TP-Link TL-R4299G is a dual WAN router. It’s a business class router which is suitable for small businesses that require multi WAN connections. You can connect the router to two different broadband Internet services for load balancing. The router is designed based on the Intel XScale technology with multi-CPU distributed processing with maximum frequency 533MHz. the good thing with the router is that it includes built-in high-redundancy power module to eliminate the power outage due to power adapter failure.

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TP-Link TL-R4299G supports fail-over / failback and load balancing features. You can configure one line as the primary line and connect to cable services, while the other line connects to ADSL as the fail-over when the primary line is failure. This way you can assure a constant – uninterruptable internet connection to meet your business need.

For your local wired network, you can connect up to 8 computers with gigabit NIC enabled. TP-Link TL-R4299G dual WAN router is embedded with 8xgigabit (10/100/1000) to let you connect the computers directly or expand the network by adding one or more gigabit switch when your business grows.

Port-based Quality of Services

Unlike home wireless routers which the Quality of service feature base on the traffic type, the TP-Link TL-R4299G supports the IP and port-based Quality of Services (QoS). With IP-based QoS, you can configure particular computer with certain IP address to have prioritization over other computers. The other great thing is that you can configure certain ports to have better prioritization over other ports. Having the prioritization for particular IP address or pots is very advantageous to meet your business needs.

Now, is this router suitable to your business? Regarding the security feature the router can support, the router supports traditional security features like other home routers do including NAT & SPI, MAC and IP address filtering to control the ability of hostile entities to attack your private network, and other basic control such as time-based access etc. How can you protect any emerging internet threats?

The figure below shows a networking diagram with dual wan port using TL-R4299G router.

Protecting the network against any emerging internet threats comprehensively, the TP-Link TL-R4299G router cannot effectively do the job. You can deploy any types UTM appliances for comprehensive protection against viruses, malware and other threats. This will increase the overhead cost. If security is the main concern, you can consider with Cisco RV016 which supports the optional Cisco Protect-Link – a services that dynamically filter the contents. But you know that this is not a free service, you must purchase a service plan in yearly basis. Security protection is not cheap to implement but it is worth to deploy for protecting your business information assets.

Should you require an affordable router that features fail-over or load balancing, the TP-Link TL-R4299G dual WAN router is your ideal solution.

Alternate Solutions

There are other types of dual wan router available in the market you can consider to meet your business needs, some of them are as follows:

Cisco RV042 and Cisco RV082

Cisco RV042 and RV082 are dual WAN routers with load balancing and redundancy connections features. You can configure the router to have one WAN connection to Cable or DSL connection while the other WAN port can be connected as the backup line which work as failover / failback feature.

The main differences between the two are:

Both dual WAN VPN routers are ideal solution for small offices (SOHO) with affordable prices you can consider.

By Ki Grinsing

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