Aggregating/bonding multiple WAN connections?

[AhmedIlyas]

What routers are around that allow multiple WAN connections (i.e 2 ISP's) and bond them together creating double the throughput?

Also which one would be the primary IP or will they always jump around between them?

 

 

[emosun]

none , theyd have to be compatible with the isp anyway which the isp would never do

[AhmedIlyas]

I'm sure it's possible. And I'm also gearing more towards enterprise equipment if needs be.

[MR H.]

What you are looking for it's a load balancer If you want to use both connections at the same time.

 

It depends exactly what you need, with 2 routers, one connected to each ISP you can just configure static routes to use one or the other.

 

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

10 hours ago, AhmedIlyas said:

What routers are around that allow multiple WAN connections (i.e 2 ISP's) and bond them together creating double the throughput?

Also which one would be the primary IP or will they always jump around between them?

 

 

You can easily load balance between multiple WANs (I say easily, only specific routers will do it) for increased download speeds, this does indeed cause the traffic to bounce between IP addresses but in my experience 99% of websites are fine with this.  A router capable of handling this should also be able to set a static route for any sites that might break from this.

Uploads are a lot more complicated and requires proper bonding either via the ISP or extra equipment on the Internet side (such as a VPS running OpenMPTCProuter).

 

I personally have been using pfSense to do this, although less so recently since I got 5G as balancing is only really reliable if all WANs are a similar speed and latency (eg I had dual DSL).

[AhmedIlyas]

yeah. Thinking about it, my concern is the IP address part now because some clients need to add your IP Address to their firewalls to allow access and ideally I just want to give them the 1 primary one and not have the IP addresses, on my side, bounce around.

[Alex Atkin UK]

11 hours ago, AhmedIlyas said:

yeah. Thinking about it, my concern is the IP address part now because some clients need to add your IP Address to their firewalls to allow access and ideally I just want to give them the 1 primary one and not have the IP addresses, on my side, bounce around.

What kind of clients?  You should probably be able to route them through a fixed WAN to get around the issue while allowing everything else to balance.

[AhmedIlyas]

Clients meaning customers

 

[tkitch]

On 11/15/2021 at 1:31 AM, emosun said:

none , theyd have to be compatible with the isp anyway which the isp would never do

If you're doing a business level solution look up:  Peplink Balance

 

It's a business solution, and while not perfect, is very easy to setup and secure, and that include VPNs to other devices if needed, and very functional.  

 

Edit:  As far as "which IP do you have" the answer is both.  The firewall will have an external IP from both connections.  

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 11/15/2021 at 5:05 PM, AhmedIlyas said:

yeah. Thinking about it, my concern is the IP address part now because some clients need to add your IP Address to their firewalls to allow access and ideally I just want to give them the 1 primary one and not have the IP addresses, on my side, bounce around.

That precisely what having multiple A records on a domain is for, one for each IP address then the clients will randomly hit one of them.  Although if you're dealing with customers I'm not sure any of these solutions are going to be robust enough.