Dual WAN aggregation

[oli717]

I have ISP services from two providers. One offers 1000 Mbps download and 40 Mbps upload, while the other provides 1000 Mbps download and 300 Mbps upload. Higher speeds are not available through these providers, but I would like to combine these two connections into a single endpoint using a device that aggregates the speeds via Dual WAN, outputting the combined speed through one port. What solutions and devices exist for this? It’s important that I can use the combined speed as a single 2Gbps+ connection, both wired and wirelessly.

[Eigenvektor]

That's not generally doable, since it also requires support in the other end of the connection.

 

Whatever server you're downloading from would need to know that the data it sends needs to be split into two streams.

 

The best you can do is route requests through either connection, based on some rules like target URL and/or port to distribute traffic between both connections.

[manikyath]

the solution to do this is to rent a box in a datacenter with a symmetrical 2G connection (ideally more), then use a purpose-made VPN router that slices your WAN connection into two data streams that go trough the datacenter box, which ties them back together, and provides a single exit node.

 

in other words, unless you have some thousands of dollars burning a hole in your pocket, this solution does not make sense.

 

what you *can* do is find a dual wan router that can load balance, and while no single application will ever go faster than one connection, you could for example have two devices doing a fast download at once.

[igormp]

1 hour ago, oli717 said:

I have ISP services from two providers. One offers 1000 Mbps download and 40 Mbps upload, while the other provides 1000 Mbps download and 300 Mbps upload. Higher speeds are not available through these providers, but I would like to combine these two connections into a single endpoint using a device that aggregates the speeds via Dual WAN, outputting the combined speed through one port. What solutions and devices exist for this? It’s important that I can use the combined speed as a single 2Gbps+ connection, both wired and wirelessly.

Get a DIY router such as a nanopi and get your hands dirty, or get some off the shelf router that has this. IIRC, some higher-end Asus routers have it.

 

1 hour ago, Eigenvektor said:

That's not generally doable, since it also requires support in the other end of the connection.

 

Whatever server you're downloading from would need to know that the data it sends needs to be split into two streams.

 

The best you can do is route requests through either connection, based on some rules like target URL and/or port to distribute traffic between both connections.

While in theory what you said is true, in practice almost everything done nowadays makes use of multiple connections, which you can easily load balance across multiple links. I do so with my ARM router on 2x500Mbps links from different ISPs, which ends up working as both failover as well as load balancing:

On 12/7/2024 at 6:27 PM, igormp said:

Got a 2.5GbE switch, so now I can fully reach 1Gbps

 

55 minutes ago, manikyath said:

what you *can* do is find a dual wan router that can load balance, and while no single application will ever go faster than one connection, you could for example have two devices doing a fast download at once.

See above, the majority of applications make use of multiple connections anyway, so it's possible to load balance those.

[Lurick]

1 hour ago, igormp said:

Get a DIY router such as a nanopi and get your hands dirty, or get some off the shelf router that has this. IIRC, some higher-end Asus routers have it.

 

While in theory what you said is true, in practice almost everything done nowadays makes use of multiple connections, which you can easily load balance across multiple links. I do so with my ARM router on 2x500Mbps links from different ISPs, which ends up working as both failover as well as load balancing:

 

See above, the majority of applications make use of multiple connections anyway, so it's possible to load balance those.

Speedtest uses multiple servers and multiple destination addresses therefor can be load balanced. Most applications are single destination addresses and will NOT be load balanced across multiple WAN connections.

[igormp]

52 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Speedtest uses multiple servers and multiple destination addresses therefor can be load balanced. Most applications are single destination addresses and will NOT be load balanced across multiple WAN connections.

Most applications that are heavy on bandwidth WILL use multiple connections. Be it torrents, steam, or fetching data from CDNs.

For smaller applications, such as you opening up a png image, is it really relevant if you're downloading at 100mbps vs 1000mbps? For those latency is way more relevant instead of bandwidth.

 

"single destination address" is also not mutually exclusive with "multiple connections". You can totally have multiple connections to a single destionation.

[Lurick]

8 minutes ago, igormp said:

Most applications that are heavy on bandwidth WILL use multiple connections. Be it torrents, steam, or fetching data from CDNs.

For smaller applications, such as you opening up a png image, is it really relevant if you're downloading at 100mbps vs 1000mbps? For those latency is way more relevant instead of bandwidth.

 

"single destination address" is also not mutually exclusive with "multiple connections". You can totally have multiple connections to a single destionation.

You can and those applications are still sourced from your machine. You can have multiple different connections from multiple different machines be load balanced but a single source/destination IP (depending on the hash configured) will be hashed to one uplink for the stream, that is far different from per-packet load balancing which is much more complex and requires both sides to support it and even then it can be iffy.

[igormp]

11 minutes ago, Lurick said:

You can have multiple different connections from multiple different machines be load balanced but a single source/destination IP (depending on the hash configured) will be hashed to one uplink for the stream

No, it doesn't matter entirely. My desktop will do multiple connections to my router, which will do multiple connections to a target, if possible. Reminder that load-balancers and CDNs are a thing, even though they look to be a single IP, they are in fact not.

Even with basic HTTP stuff you can do multi-part downloads/uploads to speed-up things, as long as the server supports it. Multipath TCP has been a thing for years now.

8 minutes ago, Lurick said:

that is far different from per-packet load balancing which is much more complex and requires both sides to support it and even then it can be iffy.

Yeah, I'm not talking about the case, but sheer different connections.

As I said, majority of bandwidth-heavy applications do rely on actual different connections, given that's also how you effectively allow for easier multi-threading for increasing throughput both networking and disk-wise.