Country living multiple WAN connections

nwhaynes

I am going to be building a new house in the next year or so and my property is in the middle of nowhere so my internet options are limited. I am considering using PFSense to load balance two WAN connections:

Excede Satelite internet 10GB per month plus late night free zone Midnight-5am
Local wireless internet provider no monthly bandwidth limits but 512k up/down

Would it be possible to use PFSense for this application? My thought was to put some rules in place for certain protocols to default to the wireless provider as it is lower latency than satellite but for the most part use the satellite as my primary connection and the wireless as a backup connection. One thing that I think would be nice is if for some reason I went over the 10GB limit I would like to set some kind of rule to default to the wireless connection except during the late night free zone where the bandwidth gets restored to normal.

I was also thinking about setting up a caching proxy server in the mix to hopefully reduce bandwidth consumption and maybe using WSUS or something similar to download windows updates to a local server on the network and have it download updates during my late night free window.

Has anyone done anything similar to this or could you point me in the right direction?

nwhaynes

One more thought:

I would like to set it up so these rules only applied to my computers. I would like to set it up where if someone comes over to my house and wants to hop on wifi that they would default to wan2 so they don't use up my bandwidth ;D

phil.davis

You can setup rules to feed traffic to prefer different gateways at different times. That will let you use the satellite automatically when it is free.
You can put guests on a separate LAN and policy-route that differently. Or if you don't care that much, then allocated static-mapped IPs to all your known devices. Then policy-route the ordinary DHCP pool to the gateway you want guests to use.
But there is nothing to count quota used, and know what day of the month your quota resets.