Combining 2 Network Connections into 1 Fast/Reliable WiFi Connection in our House?

blobert

Hi Guys,

I have both an Eir (circa 75mb) and recently added Virgin Media (500mb) connections in our house.

What I'd like to have is as fast/reliable an internet connection as possible with failover. I do some video calls etc where I really need a reliable connection, ie if the Virgin Media connection drops out I can keep going with the Eir one as backup.

Funnily enough I've had issues with both networks. The Virgin Media one tends to drop it's wireless signal a lot while the Eir one is more reliable in this regard, though I had to replace the modem recently.

I got a Deco P9 wifi mesh to try and share the connection around our house and again the Virgin Media one had problems when I used that as it's source, so I winded up using it for the Eir one instead which is slower but tends to be more reliable.

What I'm wondering is if there is a Wifi Mesh product that exists that would allow me to connect both of my network connections to it (so the Eir and VM ones) ideally combine them (for a faster/more reliable connection) and use that? That way if the Eir connection is acting up for some reason, my wifi network will keep working using the VM connection till the Eir one is back again and vice versa.

Would really appreciate any help with this!

Thanks in advance

alan4cult

blobert wrote: »

Hi Guys,

I have both an Eir (circa 75mb) and recently added Virgin Media (500mb) connections in our house.

What I'd like to have is as fast/reliable an internet connection as possible with failover. I do some video calls etc where I really need a reliable connection, ie if the Virgin Media connection drops out I can keep going with the Eir one as backup.

Funnily enough I've had issues with both networks. The Virgin Media one tends to drop it's wireless signal a lot while the Eir one is more reliable in this regard, though I had to replace the modem recently.

I got a Deco P9 wifi mesh to try and share the connection around our house and again the Virgin Media one had problems when I used that as it's source, so I winded up using it for the Eir one instead which is slower but tends to be more reliable.

What I'm wondering is if there is a Wifi Mesh product that exists that would allow me to connect both of my network connections to it (so the Eir and VM ones) ideally combine them (for a faster/more reliable connection) and use that? That way if the Eir connection is acting up for some reason, my wifi network will keep working using the VM connection till the Eir one is back again and vice versa.

Would really appreciate any help with this!

Thanks in advance

Yep you need a dual WAN router. Pricey though for the good ones, you could build one with Pfsense.

You can then decide which devices use which connection or what times of day to use which connection and also as a failover as you describe when one goes down.

SDWAN firewall and wifi ap's.

funnyname

Maybe something like this

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001VFS5B4

I bought it when I first started WFH to try and make the most out of two poor connections but it didn't work as I had hoped as it doesn't combine the speeds.

KildareP

funnyname wrote: »

Maybe something like this

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001VFS5B4

I bought it when I first started WFH to try and make the most out of two poor connections but it didn't work as I had hoped as it doesn't combine the speeds.

Combining or bonding multiple lines together to give a sum of their individual bandwidths is fairly complex at a network level.

Think of it like me saying, well, if I combined multiple individual phone calls together I'll be able to get CD quality audio because I can add the collective individual bandwidth of each phone call together (each call gives me 4kHz of audio bandwidth at 8 bit so 10 calls gives me 20kHz at 16 bit which is close to mono CD quality).
You'd be sitting wondering why (and how!) you have ten phone calls coming in from me at the same time!

To do it, you need a router at your house that can do connection bonding for a start and is able to chop individual traffic flows (for example a skype call) up across multiple connections.

You then need a router at the far end that knows a given flow of traffic (your skype call) is split over several connections and to be able to piece it back together again, in the correct order (as, when you're splitting traffic up over multiple connections it won't all arrive at the far end at the same time, so they won't necessarily arrive in the correct order).
Otherwise, like with the multiple phone calls, my skype client has no idea why there are several different "calls" coming from your end at the same time (packets of data coming from each of your individual broadband lines IP addresses) when logically there should just be one.

Otherwise, at best, you can have a router that will try and split the traffic flows evenly across the connections you have (e.g. it sends your Netflix stream through Broadband Line 1 and your Zoom call through Broadband Line 2 so they're not competing with each other for bandwidth). But of course, your Netflix is limited to the maximum speed of the line it gets assigned and likewise for Zoom.

Now - if you've an open minded IT department, they could help you out.
You could use a router at your home to bond the multiple lines together and an equivalent router sitting in the office which has a VPN tunnel set up between the two.
This will bond all your broadband lines together to give you the (near) combined bandwidth and send it over the VPN to the office. Presumably the office has a high speed internet connection there and you can make use of this to then get out on to the internet at high speed.

blobert

Thanks very much for the replies guys.

From what I can gather there is not any existing simple wifi mesh that allows 2 connections to be added? Ie something like the Deco P9 I have but allowing this? That would be the easiest option if it existed.

I suspect I'd run into more problems with somthing like the above: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001VFS5B4 It seems to get very mixed reviews.

Would I be connecting the 2 connections into that via ethernet cables and then connecting the output into a wifi mesh product if I wanted to have a wifi network combining the 2 connections?

alan4cult

If you want to do this right, I'd advise a Cisco solution or Pfsense. I had a solution myself using a dual WAN switch but the routing was terrible.

It's one thing joining two connections but what you really want is the ability to control what traffic goes out/in on each connection at a per device level and maybe a per time of day level so that's what you get from a good solution.

As said above bonding connections so that you get the sum of bandwidths is very complex as the bonding needs to be done at both ends yours and subscribers, but you can still benefit from parallel connections e.g. downloading large amounts of small files or uploads will act like the sum of bandwidths or multiple video calls can use both links. Go Pfsense custom router build if you really want to get hands dirty, go Cisco if you want an off the shelf solution.

cregmon

I got one of these from Amazon warehouse a few months ago to load balance across VDSL and LTE WANs: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B078P5HBQC/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all


Its fully featured and probably not for novices but it has been rock solid since installing. I use session-based load sharing;it locates the least loaded WAN to assign individual sessions from connected devices. There are also versions with built-in LTE as well - https://www.draytek.com/products/vigor2926-lte/

bk

I'd suggest that perhaps you are overcomplicating this and looking in the wrong place.

I've Virgin Media and I find it rock solid. I'm WFH and I use VPN which is very sensitive to any disconnects, it needs to be manually reconnected when that happens and from what I've seen with Virgin, I can get days of the VPN being up.

The difference though is that I don't use Virgin Media's wifi, which for the most part seems unreliable. Instead I have my work laptop directly connected to the Virgin router via ethernet.

On the wifi side I have the Virgin wifi turned off, their router set to bridge/modem mode and I use my own much higher quality wifi router. That gives me FAR better wifi, with FAR fewer disconnections. Though still not quiet as good as ethernet.

If I was you, I'd focus on that first. Use ethernet if you can, put the virgin routers into bridge mode and use a better wifi router or high quality mesh system (BTW don't forget to check the wifi channels you are operating on and avoid neighbours using the same frequency).

If that doesn't work, you could then look at some of the nice load balancing options the posters above have kindly recommended. But I'd start with the ethernet/wifi system, after all you'd want those either way, even if you end up going with a load balancing system.

blobert

bk wrote: »

I'd suggest that perhaps you are overcomplicating this and looking in the wrong place.

I've Virgin Media and I find it rock solid. I'm WFH and I use VPN which is very sensitive to any disconnects, it needs to be manually reconnected when that happens and from what I've seen with Virgin, I can get days of the VPN being up.

The difference though is that I don't use Virgin Media's wifi, which for the most part seems unreliable. Instead I have my work laptop directly connected to the Virgin router via ethernet.

Thanks, I think you're probably right. I have one computer connected to it via Ethernet and the connection has been very reliable. Though weirdly when I connected up the Deco P9 system (also via ethernet) and turned the modem wifi off the signal (via the P9) was unreliable, kept dropping etc. Yet using the Eir connection via the same Deco P9 system seems to work much better.

I'd considered sending back the Deco P9 system and trying a different mesh system with VM but I'm not sure it would make a difference and the P9 is probably a good one for my house as it uses power cables as well as wireless which I think we probably need as our house is an odd bungalow with some rooms quite a long way from others.

ED E

The HUB3.0 has a critical, unfixable, flaw where if you send about 5Mb to/from it with a high packet count it crashes and reboots. This will show as 90-120 second outages. No mitigation until Virgin replace the device. No sign of that.