Load balancing router

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baterax

baterax

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Aug 28, 2013
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Hello!

I have an interesting question.

Internet sucks in the UK, so I’m working my way around it.
After some consideration and research, I’ve stumbled upon the concept of a load balancing router.
Now the idea is to get two ISPs service here (long story short, I had to get both Sky 23mbps and a business Virgin Media 350mbps connections).
Now, I understand I can have it set up one of two ways:
- Have the router use the weaker link as backup for when the other one fails
- Have it handle both connections so it effectively sums them.

Now, I have a caveat. Sky is ADSL and Virgin is cable.

To do this, I will need to use both the ISP routers and then the load balancing one after them, correct?
I want to have everything I use here on the same wifi and/or wired connection but taking advantage of both links.

Is this possible with two different technologies?
What are some pros an cons of load balancing vs. failsafe mode?
 
Solution
B
Failsafe will likely work fairly well. It will still cause a short interruption in your connection and you will have to log back into many sites. Your IP address has changed and this is not allowed both from a security stand point as well as how the basic communication works.

Load balancing for the purpose of combining the connections does not work well. Again the major problem you have is your internet connections have different IP addresses. You can not increase the speed of say a file download because you can not have 2 ip addreses in the same session.

You might if you worked at it carefully be able to send some traffic over one connection and other traffic over the other one. It is extremely hard to make this work...
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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Failsafe will likely work fairly well. It will still cause a short interruption in your connection and you will have to log back into many sites. Your IP address has changed and this is not allowed both from a security stand point as well as how the basic communication works.

Load balancing for the purpose of combining the connections does not work well. Again the major problem you have is your internet connections have different IP addresses. You can not increase the speed of say a file download because you can not have 2 ip addreses in the same session.

You might if you worked at it carefully be able to send some traffic over one connection and other traffic over the other one. It is extremely hard to make this work because of the complexity of the servers you are talking to. The example most people on this forum have seen are game servers. You login to a central server, you then are connected to the actual game server. Most time both these sessions stay open while you play. If you were to connect to the login server with 1 ip address and then attempt to connect to the game server with the other the game company will think you are a hacker and disconnect you. This is a simplistic example. There are many sites that are made up of groups of servers and ip addresses. How would your load balancer ever know what the correct combination is so it can always send the traffic over the same ISP.

Although you might if you work real hard be able to use both connection the only fairly simple way would be to say run machine A in your house always on connection # 1 and machine B in your house on connection #2. Everything else would require you to have massive knowledge of how your traffic really flows so you can program the load balancer to put it on the correct connection.

The only to really do this is either to buy special connection to a ISP that has equipment on both ends or you use commercial internet connection that only huge companies can get and use routing protocols like BGP to accomplish this.
 
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Alabalcho

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Jan 13, 2011
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@Bill001g has explained the "software" side of load balancing, what to expect and what not. For the hardware, I'm afraid you have to get three pieces: standalone DSL modem-only compatible with Sky, standalone cable modem-only compatible with Virgin, and said load-balancing router. That is unless you can put your existing DSL and cable devices (assuming they are both combo modem-router) in bridge mode, bypassing their router (actually, NAT) functions.
 
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baterax

baterax

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Aug 28, 2013
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Both ISPs are providing their modem/router combos.
So the idea is to turn off the router functions on both of them.
Then, plug them both into a dual WAN load balancing router.
Then, since apparently there's no router that can do that PLUS WiFi, I'd be plugging that one into the WiFi router.
 
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