Gaming Centre Networking?

[ne0beatsm0rp98]

Hi all,
Basically im setting up a small gaming centre and i am looking for some advice on networking please.
Right to begin with im getting 5 Xbox's, 5 PS3's and 2 gaming PC's.

In my local area the max ADSL speed i can get is 20MB > 22MB. I cant get fibre optic broadband as the local council have restricted any cable work in our area till 2015 so im stuck with the adsl.
Now i have heard somewhere you can connect say 3 broadband lines into a switch and share the 3 adsl lines across the network so that it is all evenly distributed as a single 20MB line will not be sufficient for 10-15 computers online at any given time.

So my question is, does anyone know of any easier setups? Or of any good switches i can purchase that can do this for me? And everything will be wired as wireless is a bit crap for gaming really.

Thanks in advance

 

[eibgrad]

You don't need a switch, you need a multi-WAN router. The router manages the usage of those ADSL lines depending on how you configure it. For example, you might only use the additional lines when the others are at maximum capacity, or perhaps have the load spread over all of the them round-robin, or by type of traffic or originating source IP. Lots of different configurations are possible depending upon the sophistication of the device. It’s by far the easiest way to manage multiple ADSL lines on behalf of a single local network.

For gaming, one of the concerns I’d have (that you didn’t mention) is the use of dynamic public IPs. That could be a problem if you expect to support online gaming and port forwarding for each system. Since each gaming system requires specific, fixed ports on the firewall, and port forwarding is typically only available to one local IP, you can only realistically support one XBOX, one PS3, etc., per dynamic public IP. So either you need completely separate ADSL systems (adsl line + modem + router), or else multiple STATIC public IPs and a router that can port forward all of them.

So just something else to worry about I suppose.

 

[ne0beatsm0rp98]

Thanks for that, i have looked at Quad & Dual WAN Routers, but like you said i will need a static IP for each console. Think it might be easier if i just get someone in to install it all as seems a bit complicated. Wouldnt be too bad if i could get fibre optic but no chance of that till september 2012