Using 2 ISP's
- Thread starter jdp861
- Start date
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- networking
Some info before you proceed down this path
1. Failover takes a little bit of time to activate. The device with both wan connections has to know that primary wan is down. If it's a media disconnect (interface unplugged, turned off, loss of signal), the detection is pretty much instantaneous. However, if it's a high latency/soft fail (immediate upstream router is up but connection is failing beyond that), the multi wan router will take a while (seconds) to detect the failure and switch over to the alternate wan. This is good enough for everything apart from realtime things (calls, games, live streams).
2. Your IP changes when failover is triggered. Most websites don't care. Banking (and similar secure) websites sometimes do. Sockets are disconnected and have to be reconnected, might not work in some cases (multiplayer games).
3. "double the bandwidth" also isn't that simple. A single client connection can only be routed over a single wan, but multiple connections can be routed over different wans (so file downloads over a single connection will be limited to a single wan's speed, but multi connection downloads like idm or torrents may benefit). For load balancing, if your client IP to the same server changes every other request, they may take offense and reject connections (similar to banks). Some routers like mikrotik have a feature where they can use the same wan for all the connections to a specific destination (PCC?).
Knowing all this, the actual setup of multi wan is pretty straightforward. I use pfSense, but tplink and mikrotik has multi wan routers that are relatively inexpensive. You need 2 wans, designate them as wans and set a failover with a priority order.
1. Failover takes a little bit of time to activate. The device with both wan connections has to know that primary wan is down. If it's a media disconnect (interface unplugged, turned off, loss of signal), the detection is pretty much instantaneous. However, if it's a high latency/soft fail (immediate upstream router is up but connection is failing beyond that), the multi wan router will take a while (seconds) to detect the failure and switch over to the alternate wan. This is good enough for everything apart from realtime things (calls, games, live streams).
2. Your IP changes when failover is triggered. Most websites don't care. Banking (and similar secure) websites sometimes do. Sockets are disconnected and have to be reconnected, might not work in some cases (multiplayer games).
3. "double the bandwidth" also isn't that simple. A single client connection can only be routed over a single wan, but multiple connections can be routed over different wans (so file downloads over a single connection will be limited to a single wan's speed, but multi connection downloads like idm or torrents may benefit). For load balancing, if your client IP to the same server changes every other request, they may take offense and reject connections (similar to banks). Some routers like mikrotik have a feature where they can use the same wan for all the connections to a specific destination (PCC?).
Knowing all this, the actual setup of multi wan is pretty straightforward. I use pfSense, but tplink and mikrotik has multi wan routers that are relatively inexpensive. You need 2 wans, designate them as wans and set a failover with a priority order.
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Thankyou for such extensive information brother.
Do you have any recommendations for the hardware? Any sort of priority list list?
I don't have a recommendation for a prebuilt router (as I use pfsense with a mini pc), but I know someone who is using a mikrotik with a load balancer, you may need to do some advanced configuration for load balancer setup (I just use a failover setup with my 2 wans).
TP-Link has load balancing routers which should be relatively easy to configure. I dont have any experience with them. Other options are Pfsense / Opnsense, Openwrt with MWAN3, Mikrotik , Ubiquiti etc. All of these require more effort and reasonably good skills in networking to implement it. I have used multiwan in Opnsense, Openwrt and Mikrotik and it works but the caveats mentioned in @ze_cook's post apply
You can get an ubiquiti edgerouter for cheap and it can handle two wans and is very stable.
There is tplink switch which can do this, i use mikrotik router with 2 wans and failover. With primary being high bandwidth amd secondary with low bandwidth.....in this scenario i use ping to Google DNS every few seconds and if there is fail of 4-5 pings it switches over to secondary and will keep on checking the primary after certain time so it can revert back when primary is up. My main connection can be used from my router with ppoe while my secondary connection(jio) so i just use a lan from it and make the port set with static ip from jio router so it doesn't changes whatever maybe. Been using since last 1+ year and recently i setup auto message on telegram if my main connection fails as earlier i wouldn't know if there was failure of main connection.
tplink load balancer
I think this is the TP link router you guys are talking about @rockyo27 @bobbyprajan.
Jio and Airtel both provide a router with SFP port. So in order to use this tplink router I would need to install 1 PON each for JiO and Airtel and then insert the UTP cable in this tplink load balancer. Then I need to connect another Router/AP to this tplink router to get wifi.
Correct me if I am wrong here.
Can you guys tell me this Mikrotik dual wan router and where can I get it?
I am also planning on using telegram to get a text when link goes down.
I am also not worried about configuration. I am ready to get my hands dirty.
I think this is the TP link router you guys are talking about @rockyo27 @bobbyprajan.
Jio and Airtel both provide a router with SFP port. So in order to use this tplink router I would need to install 1 PON each for JiO and Airtel and then insert the UTP cable in this tplink load balancer. Then I need to connect another Router/AP to this tplink router to get wifi.
Correct me if I am wrong here.
Can you guys tell me this Mikrotik dual wan router and where can I get it?
I am also planning on using telegram to get a text when link goes down.
I am also not worried about configuration. I am ready to get my hands dirty.
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This is what i have.
hEX | MikroTik
5x Gigabit Ethernet, Dual Core 880MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, USB, microSD, RouterOS L4
mikrotik.com
I bought from here https://multilinkonline.com/hEX-Ethernet-Router-RB750Gr3_p_849.html like 3 yrs back but is OOS as of now.
You check on below links but I'm not sure of these websites,
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