Question Is LTE bonding an option

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Feb 20, 2018
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I just bought a house that's about 10 miles outside of the main town and Internet options are slim. I refuse to get Hughs Net, somebody I called said AT&T has a fiber cable within 500 feet of my house and that would be about $350 a month with a contract, or what I'm doing now is using a 4G LTE netgear modem with a Cricket (AT&T) sim. $50 per month for 22gb of data.

With the LTE I typically speedtest around 60-90 ping, 5-10 mbps down, 2-3 mbps up. I've been able to play some not too ping intensive online games during the day if I'm home alone. Netflix generally has to buffer multiple times to watch a show. However if me and my wife both try to use our computer at the same time basic web pages stop loading. I couldn't even run a speed test with both computers online but not running any processes at all.

Until I can afford $350 a month (maybe never), and until this LEO satellite that I've been hearing about is actually up and running (a couple years if ever) I've been looking at bonding. I can upgrade my Cricket plan to 4 lines for only $100 per month. If I could bond them then I'd have something quite decent, even if I used over the 88gb of combined data and was throttled.

I've called Mushroom Networks and their router was $5k alone. "the Bonding Service would run $100.00/month for a 10/10 and $250.00/month unthrottled." "We also have that rental program and with a Truffle Lite unit and our Bonding Service bonding 4 connections that would run $228.00/month." At that point I could go with the AT&T fiber line, which isn't affordable.

I admit I'm not network wiz. Is there a router with 4 WAN ports or built in sim slots that can bond connections itself or do you have to subscribe to a bonding service? Is there a cheap bonding service that isn't specifically business/enterprise $$$$ oriented?

http://sharedband.com/business/price-plans/
This seems like a possible company. It could cost a few hundred to set up but would only bring the monthly bill total to ~$150 which is doable.

https://speedify.com/pricing/ Or this would be even cheaper at only $50 per year for bonding service.
 
I see you have gone the step beyond what most people have and have realized that you can not just combine 2 different internet connection because they have different IP address.

The way some services try to solve this is by running a vpn on both connections. You now get a new problem. The latency can be different on the connections so you get packet out of order. Even if the latency is the same you still get packet out of order. Lets say I send 11 packets 1 1500 byte one and 10 150 byte packets. To packet 1 the 1500 byte one gets put on vpn connection 1. Then packets 2-11 will be sent on vpn connection 2 during that time.

What happens is the receiving server gets packet 2-9 before it gets packet 1. It assumes that packet 1 is lost so it requests a re transmission. Depending on timing a second copy of packet 1 may be placed in the queue. What also happens is the server see so many packets lost that it just reset the connection and starts over.

High end solutions buffer the packets to hide the out of order. This cause random latency spikes though. The really advanced "network accelerators" will actually chop the packets into pieces and transmit the parts on both lines and then reassemble them.

This is why there are extremely expensive boxes.

Things like speedify try to pretend this problem does not exist. Now if you read the fine print they actually admit it does and have a special option to protect games from out of order packets. Their solution is to transmit the same data on both lines.....gee I doubt my bandwidth but I also double my data so net effect is the same as if I did not use a bonding service.

The only realistic this you can do is get a multi wan router than does load balancing. You can carefully tune traffic so some web sites always say use connection1 or certain users in your house always use a particular connection. It is more of a load balance by application or user. It allows you to use both connection but it does not actually increase the bandwidth for a single session.
 
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