[misfit68]

It's been a long time since I've been on the forums (I'm the Senior Technician at work and log over 50 hours a week) so bare with me. Also despite what I do for a living I have little experience in this area and am looking to learn more about it, so any help would be appreciated.

I live in an area with limited internet access. I am grandfathered into Sprints unlimited 3G data plan with their air card and I am paying for Verizon's 10GB limited 4G connection. With 13 devices that connect to the internet I hit my limit within the first week of the month. What I want to do is setup some kind of proxy server that will route specific devices, such as my DVRs, (easy) and applications, such as games, (a little harder) through the 3G while allowing other traffic through the 4G.

I figure the server will run the 3G modem with my Cradlepoint MBR95 router running the 4G. What would be the best way of setting this up?

[zx10guy]

Yes. It's rather easy. Since the Cradlepoint and the server running the 3G modem will have different IP addresses, all you have to do is for any device you want to only use the Cradlepoint, configure those devices to have their default gateway to be the Cradlepoint. Same goes with the 3G modem/server.

[misfit68]

That will cover my DVRs and blueray players, but I was wondering about setting up a server that would route specific ports\applications. So that one PC will have Netflix routed to the unlimited 3G and games to the faster 4G.

What kind of software would I need to look into to make this happen?

[misfit68]

Also I would like to monitor the network traffic so I can keep an eye on what is taking up most the bandwidth. I have already decided on the hardware, I just need to figure out the software.

[misfit68]

If someone could point me in the direction I need to be looking to route traffic through different ISPs I would appreciate it. I'm not looking for step by step instructions (though not against it). I think I want a server to take outgoing information, then decide if it goes through ISP A or B.

The system I have will be running 7 Pro.

[zx10guy]

If you want to do it via specific ports, then you need to have some sort of device which does policy based routing. I don't know if you can configure native Linux to do this. You might be able to. If you're looking for a SOHO or even an SMB router to do this, good luck.

If you want to do routing based on application, you're looking at a network load balancer. And when I say network load balancer, I'm not talking about dual WAN port routers you see for SMB. I'm talking about load balancers from companies like F5, Brocade, and Cisco. The load balancer has to be able to peer into the upper layers all the way up to layer 7 to do their routing. No SMB router/firewall has this capability.

I think you're just being overly ambitious with your desires. There's something to be said about the whole KISS principle.