[SOLVED] Load balancing 2 internet connections

[Blasphemy_]

I have 2 internet connections. One with good enough ping for online games and bandwidth 7d/0.6u and a second with 24d/2u.

If I combine them with a load balance router like the tp-link 470 will I have any ping issues? If the routers are connected to the load balancing router can one of them have the wifi turned on?

 

[bill001g]

You can not use them to combine the connections to get faster download. They have 2 different IP addresses. You could though download 2 different files one though each connection.

This has a very narrow usage. Mostly a dual internet router is used for primary/backup. That type of function works very well. Trying to use any form of load balancing is extremely tricky.

The example I always use since most people on this forum are gamers is. Say you use ISP 1 to connect to the main game server to authenticate your account. You then use ISP2 to attempt to connect to the world server. Because these IP are different the game company will drop the connection as hacking. The same issue occurs say if you purchase something and the main web site is on a different server as the credit card processing. You will also get constant captcha "are you a bot" type of things from service like google.

There is no load balancing router than can know about all these restrictions.

What you can do is say run netflix and youtube one connection and your other traffic on the other.

There are ways to accomplish the same thing without a dual wan router with special cabling and use of the ROUTE command on the end devices that support it. It still suffers from all the same restrictions of not being able to fully use both connections.

 

[Blasphemy_]

I see, I guess then I will use the one with the lower ping for gaming and the other with the better bandwidth for streaming. Thanks for your answer

 

[kanewolf]

I see, I guess then I will use the one with the lower ping for gaming and the other with the better bandwidth for streaming. Thanks for your answer

And you will still have to do static routes to bias the traffic the way you desire.

 

[SamirD]

I've actually been using multi-wan routers for decades now and wanted to add some clarifications.

You can actually combine them to get overall faster download and uploads, but it works very similarly to lan port aggregation in that each object (file, etc) will only be able to use one pipe or the other. Still, on a web page with hundreds of objects, being able to pool from multiple wans can dramatically speeds up downloads.

And the same is true for uploads, which was my use case. I needed more upload bandwidth than was available back then (8m/384k was the max), so I got 3x of these connections. When used together with multiple simultaneous file uploads, I was able to sustain over 1Mbps aggregate upload speeds. But every single individual file transfer was still limited to a maximum speed of 384k.

Another concept that is available in most multi-wan routers now is a feature call 'persistent connections' or 'wan binding' where a certain protocol or url can be 'bound' to a particular wan or 'persistent' for a given amount of time before being shuffled to another wan. This helps keeps secure logins from breaking, etc, so in-game purchases and logins won't have problems.

The equipment I've used over the years have been from the Cisco rv-series, but they have undergone many changes since I last used them. I've since learned that enterprise equipment is much more robust in the handling of multi-wan and can be obtained used for around the same price as new consumer multi-wan, so it presents a tremendous value. I'm currently using watchguard products and have been very happy.

Now, there is an exception to all of this but it's only made by one company and it is proprietary in its operation--peplink. These guys are the experts at multi-wan bonding, where they actually can bind connections together into one homogeneous pipe. Their products are not cheap, but what they can do is second to none:

Bandwidth Bonding Technology SpeedFusion

Choose SpeedFusion Technology to combine multiple WAN links for speed, resilience & reliability. At packet-level, you get session-persistence & hot failover.

www.peplink.com