Has Anyone Combined Bandwidth From Multiple Internet Connections?

[danfred]

Just wondering if it really can be done and how effective it really is?

I'm looking into a product called a PepLink Balance (http://www.peplink.com/products/balance-30/) which appears to be able to spread your downloads over multiple Internet connections. It only works for applications that open multiple concurrent network connections such as web browsers, download managers, torrent files, etc. but that's mostly what I would want it for anyway. It won't work for VPN, SSL connections and VoIP calls by design as those types of network sessions require a connection from a single IP address (connections from multiple IP addresses would cause problems).

My plan is to use my existing IPStar satellite (1024/512) and TTT Maxnet adsl (1024/512) together on the device and if it works as promised add yet another adsl line (the device supports 3 WAN connections) for a total of 3072 download speed (wishful thinking). The bandwidth combining router costs US$500 so I'm hoping it's not a waste of money and that it will pay for itself by providing enhanced network performance by allowing more concurrent connections and throughput to EU and US locations (and also provide seamless failover if either the satellite or adsl fails as they DO countless times each day).

I of course have already tried upgrading both the satellite and adsl connections to more expensive packages but I never really saw any consistent performance increases when accessing EU and US locations.... so I downgraded them both back to 1024/512 and just dealt with it (I felt like I was wasting less money).

I should have the new device in a few weeks (when my parents comes for a visit)... I'll let you know how it works out if you're interested.

[george]

Very interesting indeed. Wonder how well this would balance CDMA and IPstar?

[davejonesbkk]

Yes, it seems very interesting. Please keep us posted.

[danfred]

Very interesting indeed. Wonder how well this would balance CDMA and IPstar?

I had thought about using a GPRS connection as the third WAN connection just for added redundancy... but the WAN connections have to be ethernet based and that would mean buying a $400+ dedicated GPRS modem that has an ethernet port. For a slow GPRS connection it's just not worth it in my mind (and it's not that often that both satellite and adsl are down at the same time anyway). Perhaps if you were getting EDGE/EVDO speeds it might be a worthy option (I live in Roi Et and don't have these options). I've been reading that in the US the PePLink device is becoming popular for backing up municipal WiFi with ADSL.

[monty]

I use a load balancing router, basically a cheap old PC (celeron 800 with 128mb ram) and 3 network cards in it running the PF sense software.

This does what you talk about, balancing, failover etc.

In my case I have a 256 kbps adsl and a 2mbps cable connection, so the added speed the 256 adsl would give me, would not increase my 2mbps speed a lot...

So I set the system only to failover, cable goes down, adsl takes over seamlessly... When doing load balancing, the system will assign an internet connection round robin style to each connection made by your PC.

In my case, if using load balancing , when opening a page with for example a 300 kB jpeg and a 10 kB gif file I had a 50% chance that the big JPEG got assigned to my 256 ADSL and the 10kB file to my 2 mbps cable connection, with the result that the page loaded much slower compared to just using the cable!

If however both your connections are of the same speed, you can virtually double your download speeds if using a download accelerator, as well as speeding up page loading since all the separate items a webpage consists of will be spread over the 2 connections!...

It's easy to set separate applications to only use a single connection (VOIP for example would failusing multiple connections simultaneously), but the problems start with for example on-line banking sites locking you out when multiple IP adresses are detected!

PF sense does have a future called "sticky connections" solving that problem, but you would lose part of the added speed when loading pages. With the sticky connection on, for example all the Thaivisa sponsor banners would get loaded using 1 internet connection, Google banners would use the other connection though since they are on a different server...

Not easy to get everything working the way you like, but, if like me, you like to tinker with stuff like that, it is a tremendous powerful and dirt cheap solution!!!

P.S. another friend of mine using it tells me that the load balancing seriously confuses his P2P applications! Not sure if he managed to get increased speed out of it!

[yeti]

Yes, please tell us if it's a good solution.

For P2P I hope that port forwarding is easy to set up.

[sweetchariot]

Just a thought from a non-techy, would it not be simpler and cheaper to get a single faster connection? I know Cat are doing a 5 meg line now for about 5,000 baht per month.

[monty]

Port forwarding (actually firewall rules) are easy to get going.

Depending on what brand of router you have, you can use your router as modem and let PFsense do the PPoE, so at least you don't need to bother with port forwarding on the router then!

would mean buying a $400+ dedicated GPRS modem that has an ethernet port

Stick the gprs modem into one of those cheap pc's like the one I use for the pfsense (you can buy them under 2000 Baht in Pantip). Enable internet sharing and the thing will work as a router! Get some batch file on it so that after a power outage the gprs will connect automatically. Not a very stylish solution, but effective, and above all very cheap

[monty]

Just a thought from a non-techy, would it not be simpler and cheaper to get a single faster connection? I know Cat are doing a 5 meg line now for about 5,000 baht per month.

Faster connection might not be possible (distance to telco exchange etc), but mainly it's the redundancy making it very attractive (at least if your 2 internet connections come in through two different media).

Since I've had the system up and running, the only downtime (i.e. completely no internet access) has been when the bloody main power goes down

[nikster]

FWIW - last time I was in the networking shop, they had a load balancing router for just over BHT 5,000. I thought that was surprisingly cheap. It was either a Cisco or a DLink, don't remember which.

It looks the same as a normal router except it has 2 WAN ports, e.g. two different in-ports for internet connections, you can hook up 2 DSL connections, or 1 DSL, 1 cable, etc.

I don't have a 2nd PC, nor do I want to get one, nor do I want to run one 24/7... the router saves energy with the additional benefit of lasting 30 - 60 minutes on the UPS. Pretty important where I live The power goes out fairly often in these parts ...

I was going to get it but CAT CDMA doesn't have an EV-DO terminal for sale. So I do redundancy the manual way - when TOT goes out, I fire up the USB CDMA modem. Works for me

Edited November 13, 2007 by nikster

[sweetchariot]

Just a thought from a non-techy, would it not be simpler and cheaper to get a single faster connection? I know Cat are doing a 5 meg line now for about 5,000 baht per month.

Faster connection might not be possible (distance to telco exchange etc), but mainly it's the redundancy making it very attractive (at least if your 2 internet connections come in through two different media).

Since I've had the system up and running, the only downtime (i.e. completely no internet access) has been when the bloody main power goes down

Thanks Monty.

Might be worth considering, but CAT in Pattaya are fairly reliable.

[monty]

Definitely overkill for home use I would think, unless you just like to play with things like me

As for installing these old PC's to use as a router, they don't use a lot of power, the program gets loaded from a cd, configuration is either stored on a floppy or a usb stick. No hard disk present.

No monitor nor keyboard connected, the ones I use for it (have a load old compaq small form deskpro's for that kind of stuff, also use them for making a NAS out of them) are about the size of two regular routers...

Loads of them in Pantip (and TukCom Pattaya) for between 1500 and 2800 Baht...

[nikster]

Definitely overkill for home use I would think, unless you just like to play with things like me

Loads of them in Pantip (and TukCom Pattaya) for between 1500 and 2800 Baht...

How long do these last on a UPS? What processor inside? What OS running?

You also need to add the cost for 3 networking cards, or is that included in your 1500 - 2800 Baht estimate?

tx

[monty]

Definitely overkill for home use I would think, unless you just like to play with things like me

Loads of them in Pantip (and TukCom Pattaya) for between 1500 and 2800 Baht...

How long do these last on a UPS? What processor inside? What OS running?

You also need to add the cost for 3 networking cards, or is that included in your 1500 - 2800 Baht estimate?

tx

Runs around 45 minutes on UPS, celeron 800, 128 MB, no hard disk is installed. In a normal set-up it's the monitors, graphic cards and hard drives eating all the juice. An 800 Mhz celeron and 3 lan cards don't use much!

PFsense is based on a stripped down freeBSD (linux) live version, so no hard disk for an OS required. Once it's loaded from the cd-rom into the ram and running, you access the webbased GUI just the same like you would access your normal adsl router using internet explorer or firefox. Alternatively, the whole thing can be put on a bootable USB stick and run from there, negating even the use of the cd rom, along with faster booting after a prolonged power cut!

Or you can install on a flash memory card plugged into an ide to flash adapter, in that configuration it's an exact copy of how a real router is built!

LAN cards are indeed not included, but most of these PC's already have one on board, so only 2 extra needed at about 280 Baht each. Generic el cheapo realtek chipsets work perfectly well...

In the Compaq I use for NAS I have the FSB of the motherboard set at 66 mHz instead of the normal 100, so the celeron 800 runs at 528 Mhz, which it does perfectly well with only passive cooling...

I might bring down the FSB on my pfsense box as well, CPU usage hardly ever goes over 10%...

[gharknes]

Just wondering if it really can be done and how effective it really is?

I'm looking into a product called a PepLink Balance (http://www.peplink.com/products/balance-30/) which appears to be able to spread your downloads over multiple Internet connections. It only works for applications that open multiple concurrent network connections such as web browsers, download managers, torrent files, etc. but that's mostly what I would want it for anyway. It won't work for VPN, SSL connections and VoIP calls by design as those types of network sessions require a connection from a single IP address (connections from multiple IP addresses would cause problems).

My plan is to use my existing IPStar satellite (1024/512) and TTT Maxnet adsl (1024/512) together on the device and if it works as promised add yet another adsl line (the device supports 3 WAN connections) for a total of 3072 download speed (wishful thinking). The bandwidth combining router costs US$500 so I'm hoping it's not a waste of money and that it will pay for itself by providing enhanced network performance by allowing more concurrent connections and throughput to EU and US locations (and also provide seamless failover if either the satellite or adsl fails as they DO countless times each day).

I of course have already tried upgrading both the satellite and adsl connections to more expensive packages but I never really saw any consistent performance increases when accessing EU and US locations.... so I downgraded them both back to 1024/512 and just dealt with it (I felt like I was wasting less money).

I should have the new device in a few weeks (when my parents comes for a visit)... I'll let you know how it works out if you're interested.

i don't see how this could work, as already mentioned each connection will have a different ip address

[danfred]

Before deciding on the PePLink Balance I did consider PFsense along with the D-Link LB604, Netgear FVS124G and Linksys RV082 hardware routers. After reading countless reviews and evaluations of the hardware-based routers I found that they all appear to work just fine if you're simply looking for a failover solution, but when it comes to load balancing (and aggregating bandwidth) there is considerable configuration that needs to be done to fix the problems with P2P, SSH, SSL, VPN, VoIP, etc. I found many people recommending the PePLink to avoid such problems. Additionally D-Link, Netgear and Linksys have large product lines and failover/load-balancing is not their primary focus... and it's not the primary focus of their tech support either and if you really want support you need to look into things like Cisco routers and spend thousands of dollars.

I think PFsense is the best choice if you want to save some money and you have the time or desire to configure it to do the failover/load-balancing. I'm not sure how reliable it would be however (as with anything open source you are the one that has to support it). If your went this route I think you could save even more money if you bypassed running it on a dedicated computer (with multiple NICs). You could connect all your WAN connections and your PC to a switch and then run PFsense in the background as a small virtual machine on your PC (assuming it doesn't need much RAM or CPU). On the virtual machine you would assign a virtual network adapter to each WAN connection and then route your PC's traffic through the virtual machine (by setting your PC's gateway and DNS to the local IP address of your virtual machine). In the past I ran Kerio WinRoute Firewall like this (Kerio also supports 2 WAN connections) and it worked... although Kerio does not do any load balancing and still costs several hundred dollars. Doing any of this of course adds even more complexity to your setup. In the end I decided on the PePLink router as it's dedicated to the task of failover/load-balancing and appears to be a plug it in and forget it type of solution which it ultimately what I'm after. It's configured to deal with the P2P, SSH, SSL, VPN, VoIP issues right out of the box and that could save many headaches. We'll see how it goes!

Btw, I should mention I work full-time here in Thailand for my US-based technology company and this requires me to communicate with staff daily and deal with a server outage at a moment's notice. The poor Internet service here in Thailand has bit me quite a few times... so the PePLink is just my latest desperate attempt to prove that I can stay here and run the business remotely. I know things will improve over time as technology advances (I hope!). Redundancy has never really been the issue (I have IPStar and ADSL/GPRS backups and there's also the Internet cafe around the corner and the hotel with free wireless down the street)... but what really kills me is the latency to the US and EU! I use concurrent Remote Desktop connections all day long to manage hundreds of servers in San Francisco and Amsterdam and my productivity is way down due to the amount of time it takes to control these servers remotely. This more than anything is the driving force behind my company's switch to Linux as SSH shells are so much quicker to get things done in!

[danfred]

i don't see how this could work, as already mentioned each connection will have a different ip address

it does work (i assume since i don't have the device yet)... the router will detect connections which require a persistent route and NOT route that traffic over multiple WAN connections. no real benefit here with increased bandwidth, but you still get load-balancing and failover in those cases where the persistent route is required.

[monty]

In the PePLink Balance session binding is the same as what is called sticky connections in Pfsense.

Eventhough pfsense is open source, it is used so widely in businesses that commercial support is available, albeit not cheap at 350$/year!

It seems the PePlink costs around 500 US$, which would definitely be reason enough for me to try out Pfsense first...

Even with the high configurability, it is actually not hard to get going properly, and answers to your problems are most often already in the quite active forum on the product...

P.S. is the PePlink available somewhere in Thailand?

[nikster]

Danfred, I feel your pain - all of my work is in servers in the U.S. as well and most of them are Windows - RDC is a major pain, inefficient and slow for this sort of thing. Luckily I don't have to manage them. I have moved most of my remote work to an OS X box there so I can ssh in. And I am pushing for a linux server rollout. I don't really know why anyone would want to do Windows servers. Servers without ssh pre-installed seems like a bad idea to me.

Our next hope for things to improve will be the direct underseas cable to the U.S which should become operational end of 2007. This will be the first direct link from Thailand to the U.S. so it should improve lag time.

[Phil Conners]

Monty, sligthly off topic, sorry, but where did you get cable from? BTV? How good is it? How much do you pay for it? Setup costs? Inquiring minds wants to know

PS. I have a second hand Linksys Dual Wan Load Balancing router RV042 for sale for 4,000 baht in case anyone is interested.

Edited November 14, 2007 by Phil Conners

[danfred]

P.S. is the PePlink available somewhere in Thailand?

Not that I am aware... their online shop only sells to US customers eventhough they don't have a US distributer (they ship directly from Hong Kong to your house).

[danfred]

Our next hope for things to improve will be the direct underseas cable to the U.S which should become operational end of 2007. This will be the first direct link from Thailand to the U.S. so it should improve lag time.

Are you referring to the Asia-America Gateway (AAG)? According to several websites it won't become operational until 4Q 2008.

http://www.sttelemedia.com/content.asp?ContentId=1505

[nikster]

Are you referring to the Asia-America Gateway (AAG)? According to several websites it won't become operational until 4Q 2008.

http://www.sttelemedia.com/content.asp?ContentId=1505

Yes. Q4 2008, then

[danfred]

P.S. is the PePlink available somewhere in Thailand?

Not that I am aware... their online shop only sells to US customers eventhough they don't have a US distributer (they ship directly from Hong Kong to your house).

They (PePLink) just sent me a link to their online shop that works outside the US if anyone is interested (apparently they will ship to Thailand). Here's that link: https://secure.peplink.com/direct-cart/.

[george]

Just curious, did you get the Peplink up and running? How does it work?

[thestirfry]

Yes has anyone been successful yet?

I have CAT, TOT and TT&T and this would be perfect to combine all my speeds into one.

I need a minimum 1 meg download connection to London servers and am unable to find one here in Samui.

Hope to hear from someone soon.

Regards,

thestirfry

[danfred]

PePLink update:

Just over a month ago I had the TOT IPStar (1Mbps) and TTT ADSL (1Mbps) connections moved over to the new house. For a few days I had them both up and working with the PePLink device and was enjoying about 1.8Mbps combined download speed (when downloading a file from the US using CuteFTP and 8 concurrent FTP transfer threads). Web browsing seemed to be a little faster but not twice as fast as you might expect since IPStar has a lot more latency (about 3 times more than ADSL).

I'm talking in past-tense here because I've since been having connections problems (nothing new!). The ADSL started disconnecting/re-connecting every 2-3 minutes. TTT came and re-wired some phone line and it started working again but only for a few days. I have to get them to come back and take a look at it again. The IPStar is working consistently but has slowed down to about 500-600kbps even though I'm on their 1Mbps CORPORATE plan. I've got to send for them too.

Bottom line... 2 bad connections don't combine for 1 good connection! The PePLink works great but only if you have 2 or more reliable connections.

[thestirfry]

Don't worry guys i bought peplink30 and have 3 lines going into it and it is well fast for all web software, browsing and downloading, i would recommend it to anyone.