Combining DSL and Satellite internet connections, does different pings matter?

cra1

Reputable
Sep 19, 2014
15
0
4,510
My family member lives rurally without a solid, speedy internet connection. They have both a satellite connection and a (rather slow) DSL connection. If I install a load sharing/balancing router, how will the slow ping of the satellite and fast ping of the DSL affect real-time events like video chat? Would the router (TP-LINK TL-R470T+) sync the timing to keep the connection consistent? I am totally new to the concept of dual WAN routers, so any input would be helpful.
 
Solution
Dual/Multiple WAN only balances sessions. You got a video chat going on, that's a single session and will go out to one WAN and not broken into 2. During chat, you fire up browser and look for something, OK another session is started and browser session may go to WAN2 if WAN1 already busy.
Dual/Multiple WAN only balances sessions. You got a video chat going on, that's a single session and will go out to one WAN and not broken into 2. During chat, you fire up browser and look for something, OK another session is started and browser session may go to WAN2 if WAN1 already busy.
 
Solution


If individual requests aren't shared/combined, then how do people attain 15Mbps when using a 10 and 5Mb connection? Maybe i'm misunderstanding the basics of how download speed tests function...

 
So normally I would say you can not combine 2 internet circuits and get more bandwidth and leave it at that. The IP are different and so the remote sites treat you as 2 different locations. So if you have 2 say dsl circuits that can do 2m you can watch 2 normal def netflix movies at 2m each. What you can not do is watch 1 4m high def movie.

There are all kinds of other issues using 2 connection because remote sites will detect it as a security violation if they see traffic coming from different ip. They think they are being hacked. So if you work really hard at it you could for example watch netflicks on one and play games on the other.

Now in your case when you talk about the latency it brings up another so called solution. There are companies that sell so called vpn bonding "solutions" to this problem. They are trying to get around the ip limitation by adding a vpn on top of it to hide the ip.

This also has major drawbacks and most these companies try to pretend this problem does not exist. You now do not have the multiple IP problem but you now get packets out of order. This is interpreted as lost data by most application, it causes data retransmission and for live stream video or audio it causes major quality problems. Even with connection that are pretty close in latency you get major issues. When the latency is very different the connection becomes almost unusable.

Now some companies try to solve even this with hardware or software on each end to ensure packets do not get out of order but this only works when the latency is fairly close. If it is high they will delay the faster connection until they get the data from the slower in effect slowing both down to the slowest. This generally requires a special wan accelerator device so it it extremely uncommon to see this offered to the general user.

................so do not expect some magic fast connection. If you work at it you can use both but you can not really combine them,
 


Bonding multiple connections together is like having multi-core CPUs. A single request/process can only go as fast as a single connection/core, but if you have multiple requests/processes, then your total throughput will be the sum of all the throughputs.