Need help finding: 3 WAN (1 with atleast 2.5Gbps port) Router??

[jtaz16]

Hello all, I did not find anything related to my use case so here is my dilemma. 

 

I have 1 WAN Coaxial >Motorola Modem(2.5G port~1100mbps from ISP) 2nd WAN DSL(1G port ~125mbps) 3rd Starlink(1G port ~200mbps)

 

I want to combine all three into my network. As a load balancing setup. Or at the very least the Coaxial and the Starlink. My Coaxial company is very well know for outages and slowing speeds so I want the second WAN. 

I currently have a EdgerouterX, which has been working great when I had 2 DSL lines and Starlink ~400mbps down. I noticed though since I got the 1g Coaxial that my router cannot keep up. It will ping at 99% usage for CPU during speed tests with throughput of about 300-350. Even with no load balancing it only hits about 600-700 throughput.

 

Could any of you recommend a good router as a replacement? All the higher end edgerouters seem to be sold out/marked up that I see. Also I am afraid if I don't go higher end I might loose out on bandwidth. Budget around $500-700.

 

I would love a 2.5G port+1G port that can be WAN-Load balanced and a secondary 2.5G port for my home server(or link aggregation would work too.) I would rather go overkill than under since I am crazy about my network but have no good skills in the matter 

[MrSimplicity]

would something like this work? it has 1x gig wan + 2.5gb wan inputs. though seems to only have 4x 1gb outputs.

 

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Rapture-Gaming-Router-GT-AXE11000/dp/B08RWBPBBR/ref=asc_df_B08RWBPBBR/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=494674935091&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6635983323902627187&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019557&hvtargid=pla-1186961946658&th=1

 

are you looking for something 2.5gb out as well? I can't seem to find anything that has dual input + a 2.5gb out. I did find one that had 2.5gb wan/Lan. I didn't really look too deep so if you're looking something more like just a network switch then there's probably way more options out there.

[Zagna]

Maybe Mikrotik RB5009UG+S+IN + S+RJ10?

[Alex Atkin UK]

You might find this tricky as load balancing is less effective when the WANs have very different latency.

 

Another catch is the upload.  Basic load balancing any uploads will just randomly hit one of the WANs and stick to it for the duration.  If the upload speeds are very different between the WANs this is very sub-optimal if you do a lot of uploading.

[Falcon1986]

4 hours ago, jtaz16 said:

Could any of you recommend a good router as a replacement?

This and pfSense.

 

See review here.

 

4 hours ago, jtaz16 said:

My Coaxial company is very well know for outages and slowing speeds so I want the second WAN. 

Might be better to do failover.

[jtaz16]

6 hours ago, MrSimplicity said:

would something like this work? it has 1x gig wan + 2.5gb wan inputs. though seems to only have 4x 1gb outputs.

 

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Rapture-Gaming-Router-GT-AXE11000/dp/B08RWBPBBR/ref=asc_df_B08RWBPBBR/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=494674935091&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6635983323902627187&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019557&hvtargid=pla-1186961946658&th=1

 

are you looking for something 2.5gb out as well? I can't seem to find anything that has dual input + a 2.5gb out. I did find one that had 2.5gb wan/Lan. I didn't really look too deep so if you're looking something more like just a network switch then there's probably way more options out there.

Ya, I was looking into that. I assume that if you use the 2.5gb wan though they disable the ability to load balance. It probably is my next option to try if bestbuy has it available, easier to return to them vs Amazon. 

[jtaz16]

6 hours ago, Zagna said:

Maybe Mikrotik RB5009UG+S+IN + S+RJ10?

I will definitely look into that, it looks promising. As long as the UI(routerOS7) is good enough for me to fudge my way through I'll be happy! I might as well just buy a 10G port for my server! 

[jtaz16]

3 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

You might find this tricky as load balancing is less effective when the WANs have very different latency.

 

Another catch is the upload.  Basic load balancing any uploads will just randomly hit one of the WANs and stick to it for the duration.  If the upload speeds are very different between the WANs this is very sub-optimal if you do a lot of uploading.

Yes load balancing is a fickle one... It has worked fine for me for about 2 years without issues but I have not had as high bandwidth. 

 

I would love not to use fail over since starlink is quite expensive. I could maybe get away with manually assigning devices(vlan?) that don't need better latency to go through starlink instead of load balancing?That would kill my fail over option though..

 

Upload has actually had no issues with sharing for me(then again I was using two dsl lines before with same latency.) 

 

DSL ~30 ping

Coaxial ~15 ping

Starlink ~ 40-80 ping that I have noticed. 

[jtaz16]

3 hours ago, Falcon1986 said:

This and pfSense.

 

See review here.

 

Might be better to do failover.

I have tried pfsense, and I do have a spare computer to power it. I just find all the options immensely overwhelming. Also I could not find a reliable way to have my Plex server work outside of my network. 

 

I will think about fail over, my problem is that starlink is quite expensive to have just as a fail over(if you leave the service you have no guarantee of being allowed back on ). I will be using it for traveling soon.

[LAwLz]

15 hours ago, jtaz16 said:

I want to combine all three into my network. As a load balancing setup. Or at the very least the Coaxial and the Starlink. My Coaxial company is very well know for outages and slowing speeds so I want the second WAN. 

This will not work the way you want it. You will not be able to use both Internet connections at once. You will have to use one connection and then switch to the other if the primary goes down.

 

 

15 hours ago, jtaz16 said:

I currently have a EdgerouterX, which has been working great when I had 2 DSL lines and Starlink ~400mbps down. I noticed though since I got the 1g Coaxial that my router cannot keep up. It will ping at 99% usage for CPU during speed tests with throughput of about 300-350. Even with no load balancing it only hits about 600-700 throughput.

Sounds like a config or expectancy issue to me.

Have you verified which speeds you can expect on the different connections? What does the config look like on your ER-X? How did you configure load balancing on it?

[jtaz16]

6 hours ago, LAwLz said:

This will not work the way you want it. You will not be able to use both Internet connections at once. You will have to use one connection and then switch to the other if the primary goes down.

 

 

Sounds like a config or expectancy issue to me.

Have you verified which speeds you can expect on the different connections? What does the config look like on your ER-X? How did you configure load balancing on it?

My config on the Edge router is a 50/50 split. So all connections will tap equally most of the time. 

My old setup 2 DSL lines 125D/10U for both and Starlink ~140D/30U. With those three I would see the max out of all of these without CPU bottleneck. I use Steam to benchmark usually. Just download a good sized file and after about 20-30 seconds it would stabilize to max download. I would log into the router and could see them all pulling about the max rate from each line. 

 

I get about 1100-900Mbps from directly connecting my 2.5Gb modem(coaxial) from my server with 2.5gb. Starlink is about the same as stated before. 

 

Maybe what I could do is have two VLANs. First for the coaxial line for all wired devices, and a second VLAN for wireless devices that don't need the latency benefits and have them run from starlink. Could I setup two VLANs and have them failover to each others connections? Maybe with a pfsense application?  

[jtaz16]

31 minutes ago, jtaz16 said:

My config on the Edge router is a 50/50 split. So all connections will tap equally most of the time. 

The router was set at 50/50 before, for the split by default. I changed it to 20(DSL)/80(Coax) and no change. still limited to about 300~350 due to CPU constraints it seems. 

[jtaz16]

1 hour ago, jtaz16 said:

The router was set at 50/50 before, for the split by default. I changed it to 20(DSL)/80(Coax) and no change. still limited to about 300~350 due to CPU constraints it seems. 

It seems the issue for my router was that "Offload" was not enabled. Fixed my issue completely. Getting close to the 900mbs through 3 switches via Speedtest.net. I am pretty happy with that. 

Solution Link

[LAwLz]

On 5/8/2022 at 9:37 AM, jtaz16 said:

It seems the issue for my router was that "Offload" was not enabled. Fixed my issue completely. Getting close to the 900mbs through 3 switches via Speedtest.net. I am pretty happy with that. 

Solution Link

Glad that you got it working.