Question Is it possible to combine Ubiquiti wireless bridges

[strikerty]

So here is my situation. I cannot get high speed internet at my home and since 2009 have been using a ubiquiti wireless bridge kit
of some sort to get internet to my house from a neighbors house 1.2KM away. I recently got an upgrade to my internet speed so that now at my modem I am getting nearly 500mb down.

I am using Ubiquitis PowerBeams and averaging between 150 and 200 down most of the time. I really want the full speed of my
internet but to get a wireless bridge that will do it requires purchasing something along the lines of Ubiquitis AirFiber 5 antennas and well, they run about 800 to 1200 dollars apiece.

I have another one of ubiquitis bridge kits that is around the same speed and was thinking of doing some type of load balancing between the two bridge kits and combining them. I dont believe load balancing is what im really looking for though Im looking for more of a way to combine the two wireless bridges together to increase my over all throughput.

I have looked on the internet quite a bit and dont seem to find a solution but figured I would put it out there in case someone else knows or has looked into combining network links before.

Thanks

 

[bill001g]

Those work much better than I would have suspected. I am assume you talking the newer powerbeam ac units. I not used their newer tech and I was very happy to get even 100mbps out of the older units.

So the short answer is you can't really combine them without issues. The longer answer is below.

Your first issue is how do you keep the 2 connections from interfering. I suppose you could run 1 pair on 2.4 and the second on 5g. Maybe you can set them to different radio channel groups.

So lets assume you have 2 radio links that are more or less equal in speed. What you can do is use one of the many ethernet port bonding methods You can not use the standard 802.3ad because it balances by session so a single transfer will be on one connection and the other will be idle. So speedtest will only show 1/2 the speed. You could run 2 speedtest at the same time and if you get lucky it could put one on each but it could also put both on the same and leave one still idle.

What you want to use is one of the proprietary load balance methods. The one you see the most uses round robin. So it puts packets say 1,3,5 on connection 1 and packet 2,4,6 on connection 2. Sounds good unless the packets are different sizes. Say packet 1 was 1500 bytes and all the others are 64bytes. So packets 3&5 have to wait until packet 1 finished. The other connection can send all three of its packets before packet 1 completes. The machine on the far end receives the packets in the order 2,4,6,1,3,5.

The end machine will figure this out most times but if there are longer delays or very out of order packets it will discard them. Very technically when it gets packet 2 it thinks packet 1 was lost so it asks for a retransmisson if it does not see it. All depends on the timing. Our of order packets can cause slowness because of retransmissions. It also puts a larger CPU burden on the end machine because it is trying to keep track of this.

If the link speeds are different it makes this problem even worse.


SO if you really want to you could try it.


....and if you are really really ambitious there are devices called wan accelerators that actually break the packets down and into fragments and reassemble and keep them in the correct order. There are free versions of this software but the commercial boxes cost as much as a small car.