A packet forwarding apparatus comprises a plurality of line interfaces each for communicating with one of user terminals or one of redundant gateways, and a protocol processing unit for controlling packet forwarding among the line interfaces. The protocol processing unit forwards a connection initiation request packet received from a user terminal to the plurality of redundant gateways and forwards to the user terminal only one response packet which is selected according to connection load status information of each gateway stored in a load distribution management table from among a plurality of response packets received from the gateways within a predetermined period of time.