Canadian Broadband → Load Balancing - Does it split bandwidth/double speed?

Good afternoon,

I have a question regarding load balancing setups (basically dual WAN setups that split bandwidth).

I am a former TekSavvy MLPPP (and I loved the setup) user who now lives in an area without DSL, I am forced to rely on the expensive TurboHub for anything that requires some speed. I also use the somewhat reliable Xplornet 4G Satellite service that is weather dependant, and tends to be flaky with regards to connection.

1) Does a load balancing router take two (or more) access points and split it somewhat evenly regarding bandwidth and/or speed when surfing and/or downloading?

2) If so, would this be a possible way to take say two Bell Turbo-Hubs, and load balance them, to split the bandwidth as evenly as possible (and perhaps double speed).

The Turbo-Hub gets expensive after 15 gigs. I was thinking of taking 2 Turbo-hubs and linking them together using a dual WAN setup of some sort (hardware/software firmware yet to be determined). This would give me 30 gigs of bandwidth.

The big problem with the Turbo Hub is it is internet that is too expensive to use at 10 to 15 dollars a gig for every gig above 15.

Thanks

R

1- say like if you are downloading a single stream file, just like any of your normal download from browser, load balancing router will choose one line or another.

lets say if you have 2 computer running different website, then one may choose line A and another choose line B.

2- no double speed, only way to do this is MLPPP for single stream(also bonding, which I do not think you can do it with turbo hub)

most router should have the ability to run custom rule about how to send data over wan, and should be able to stop when you hit the limit.

Load balancing comes in a variety of flavours. In all cases, though, a single transfer (like a single file download from a web browser) can never go faster than one of the load balanced connections. The only time you'll see the full throughput is when you have multiple simultaneous transfers. This tends to happen most easily with software like BitTorrent, which naturally splits files up into many simultaneous transfers.

Managing this sort of thing can be difficult. If it's just two identical connections, it's not so hard; you can get away with just balancing connections evenly. Maybe even take actual load into account; if connection 1 is maxed out with a single connection, and connection 2 is at half capacity with ten connections, the logical thing to do is to put more load on connection 2, not 1.

If the connections aren't identical, though, that gets a lot harder. For one thing, how much capacity does a connection actually have? There's no easy way to measure this, for a piece of software to know how fast your connections are. Should it be the fastest speed they've seen over a given connection? Well, what if the conditions change, and that speed isn't accurate anymore? Figuring this sort of thing out on the fly is a very non-trivial problem, which is why most load-balancing solutions require the user to manually enter the speeds of the various connections.

But when you're mixing and matching different kinds of connections like satellite and cellular, now you're even combining things with completely different properties in terms of things like latency and reliability... I'm not sure there's really any software on the market right now that will work really well doing that. There's some on the horizon, though. Connectify Dispatch got some hype recently, since Connectify claims that it manages all this stuff between disparate connections on the fly, dynamically picking what to use:

»www.connectify.me/dispatch/

It's not out yet, but I'm interested in seeing reviews when it is. It's not going to be as good as MLPPP on two identical connections, but for disparate connections where load balancing is the best you can do, it looks like it will be a huge improvement over the current stuff out there.

After checking the website for connectify, it seems pretty interesting..... Will have to take a wait and see attitude on this one as technology improves. Being just on the edge of dsl and living the connected lifestyle keeps me on the constant lookout for ways to improve things!

It might have been you Guspaz that got me thinking months ago about technology (yet to be devloped) combining satellite with its high latency And something slow with low latency (like dial up).

Thanks for the replies and info!!!

Ryan

It was, but I don't think even Connectify is really designed with that in mind (maybe it is, no clue). The concept is largely just a theoretical idea that I had, not something that anybody will likely ever actually do.

dial up is not even close to low latency. Heck 3G is not either.

Everything is relative:

3G latency: 100ms+
Dialup latency: 150ms+
Satellite latency: 600ms+

Yeah, compared to satellite, dialup is low-latency. Things that are impossible on satellite (like twitch gaming) are possible with tweaks on dialup.