I am building a router for a buddy of mine. In his area they don't have traditional cable internet and he refuses to get Starlink so, he's limited to DSL lines, of which he has 2 that feed into his home to an ISP modem/router(Century Link is the ISP). Is their a well known set of PCIe DSL cards that work with OpenWRT? Or is there some other way to get 2 DSL connections and turn them into an Ethernet connection that I can then feed into the router. Should I just try to bridge from the ISP modem/router to my router?
What do you guys think I should do? Do you know of any DSL PCIe cards?
I think I have a PCIe VDSL2/ADSL2+ PCIe card(VigorNIC 132) from from a company called DrayTek but I don't know if it would work with OpenWRT or linux.
These are a modem on a card that interfaces to the host via a NIC chipset (brada4's command should help identify the NIC chipset). I think you can have multiple cards in a host, as long as the host OS can support them. The standalone equivalent is the Vigor 130 which has the same modem hardware. Even though the modem hardware (Lantiq VR9) is supported by OpenWrt, the Draytek devices aren't supported. I've not heard about any other DSL PCIe cards, but there have also been a couple of SFP form factor modems (Metanoia?) that might work in a multiple SFP NIC.
You would need to use something like mwan3 to spread traffic over the multiple connections, though a full bonding arrangement requires support at the other end of the link as well (possible via a cloud host I believe). What you can achieve, and how best to configure each modem connection (e.g. bridging vs having the modem manage the connection) is likely limited by what your ISP and link combining tooling (e.g. mwan3) supports/permits.
I wouldn't use the modem on card approach myself because if there's a failure it's a lot more painful to replace then an external modem, but each to their own.
I believe these DSL SFP modules (Metanoia, Proscend, Allnet, ... all selling the same, with IIRC metanoia being the source) are now leaving or have already left the market. They as far as I remember reading, did run quite hot, lacked in easy configurability, and might also not be compatible with all SFP cages (but that last issue seems somewhat normal for SFPs).
DSL line bonding is tricky, if your ISP supports that (solving the upstream node issue) they will know what modem is compatible with their DSLAM, if you do poor man's bonding you need your own upstream node to split/combine the two streams in down/up direction. Mwan3 will allow distributing flows over multiple lines by hash IIRC, which in aggregate will be similar to bonding, but every individual flow will be unable to saturate all wan links concurrently.
I don't have it installed because I didn't even know if it worked and I would need a second one, which I do not have. I can check it out for you later this weekend though, if you want.
Sorry for the late reply was away on work and just got back home.