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Looking for Dual-WAN suggestions

  • 26-11-2018 2:24pm
    #1
    heavydawson
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,167 ✭✭✭


    Hey all,
    I'm a pretty happy Nova Broadband customer with one exception, their latency is wildly unpredictable when you've got heavy upstream in addition to downstream traffic. This is the case with the company video conferencing solution we use (Zoom). Recently I've taken to enabling the mobile hotspot on my phone prior to any video calls from home, and this works very well. I'm with Vodafone, and the 4g reception is pretty good in the area.
    However, rather than chewing through my phone data allowance, I was looking at the option of adding the Vodafone 4G mobile broadband router to my setup.
    I've seen some horror stories about the DNS on that, so I'll likely buy an unlocked Huawei B528 (other recommendations are welcome), and pop the Vodafone SIM in there.

    The main question I have is this. I'd like to route ALL traffic _except_ that destined for the Zoom servers through my existing Nova connection, and all Zoom traffic through the Vodafone box.

    I have all of the cabling, switches, etc. in place to do this, it's just more a matter of which device should act as the multi-wan device. I'd been seriously looking at the Peplink Balance One Core, as it's policy based routing looks pretty comprehensive, but it's quite expensive. It seems most multi-wan routers are.

    Zoom have a pretty comprehensive list of the all the IPs/Ports they use:
    https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362683-Network-Firewall-or-Proxy-Server-Settings-for-Zoom

    Can anyone recommend a multi-wan device that allows outbound routing based on destination?


Comments

  • #2
    Squozen
    Registered Users Posts: 118 ✭✭Squozen


    heavydawson wrote: »
    Hey all,
    I'm a pretty happy Nova Broadband customer with one exception, their latency is wildly unpredictable when you've got heavy upstream in addition to downstream traffic. This is the case with the company video conferencing solution we use (Zoom). Recently I've taken to enabling the mobile hotspot on my phone prior to any video calls from home, and this works very well. I'm with Vodafone, and the 4g reception is pretty good in the area.
    However, rather than chewing through my phone data allowance, I was looking at the option of adding the Vodafone 4G mobile broadband router to my setup.
    I've seen some horror stories about the DNS on that, so I'll likely buy an unlocked Huawei B528 (other recommendations are welcome), and pop the Vodafone SIM in there.

    The main question I have is this. I'd like to route ALL traffic _except_ that destined for the Zoom servers through my existing Nova connection, and all Zoom traffic through the Vodafone box.

    I have all of the cabling, switches, etc. in place to do this, it's just more a matter of which device should act as the multi-wan device. I'd been seriously looking at the Peplink Balance One Core, as it's policy based routing looks pretty comprehensive, but it's quite expensive. It seems most multi-wan routers are.

    Zoom have a pretty comprehensive list of the all the IPs/Ports they use:
    https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362683-Network-Firewall-or-Proxy-Server-Settings-for-Zoom

    Can anyone recommend a multi-wan device that allows outbound routing based on destination?

    Could you get away with manually creating static routes for the Zoom traffic?


  • #3
    9726_9726
    Registered Users Posts: 440 ✭✭9726_9726


    If the upstream is maxed with your Zoom traffic, you will introduce latency. This is the case on any network link that you congest at any moment in time.

    You can get over this by (a) more bandwidth or (b) QOS to limit the congesting flow to below the available bandwidth figure.

    In this case, (b) is your only option, so you should be able to use QOS to ensure your Zoom upstream bandwidth only uses X % of your upstream. I just did a quick Google and Zoom uses ports 80 and 443, standard HTTP/HTTPS ports and a whole load of IPs, so it won't be easy to tag the traffic.

    What OS are you running the Zoom client on?


  • #4
    ED E
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 36,169 ✭✭✭✭ED E


    Its worth noting 97 that thats only true for Nova being half duplex. With his FDD LTE the US band has no impact on the DS band and typically has spare US available.

    QOS won't help if the total available bandwidth isnt sufficient for the single application in use (assuming no other local loads).



    Any 4port Edgemax will do this but won't necessarily be a one button setup.


  • #5
    9726_9726
    Registered Users Posts: 440 ✭✭9726_9726


    Correct, the upstream and downstream are, in this case, the same half duplex network link, so congestion is congestion.


  • #6
    Big Lar
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,431 ✭✭✭Big Lar


    You could setup a mikrotik with dual wan, have nova broadband as your preferred route, then a mangle rule to mark packets used by the software and finally route those packets via the 4g route.


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  • #7
    heavydawson
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,167 ✭✭✭heavydawson


    Thanks for all the suggestions folks. FYI, I have no official specs for the Nova connection, other than the TX device they installed on the house -Ubiquiti PowerBeam M5 400.

    What I've done to date is:
    Popped the Vodafone Huawei B528 in the attic. ( I have 2 RJ45 ethernet ports up there). The Nova device goes into the second port. At the patch panel downstairs I run both directly to the main house router (Asus RT AC68U) in Dual-WAN mode.
    In Dual-WAN Load-Balancing mode you can add outbound rules matching source and destination addresses, so I plan on adding a rule for:
    ANY source IP heading to ANY ZOOM IP (no option to specify port) will route through the Vodafone WAN. I'll report back when I get a chance to test.

    On a side note, the Vodafone device is a screamer. I'm not a 4G+ area, but I'm seeing consistent speeds between 30-70Mb/s. I suppose it helps the site is relatively high and we have 3/4 masts in range.


  • #8
    heavydawson
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,167 ✭✭✭heavydawson


    9726_9726 wrote: »
    If the upstream is maxed with your Zoom traffic, you will introduce latency. This is the case on any network link that you congest at any moment in time.

    You can get over this by (a) more bandwidth or (b) QOS to limit the congesting flow to below the available bandwidth figure.

    In this case, (b) is your only option, so you should be able to use QOS to ensure your Zoom upstream bandwidth only uses X % of your upstream. I just did a quick Google and Zoom uses ports 80 and 443, standard HTTP/HTTPS ports and a whole load of IPs, so it won't be easy to tag the traffic.

    What OS are you running the Zoom client on?

    OS = Mac OS


  • #9
    heavydawson
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,167 ✭✭✭heavydawson


    Quick update. I configured the RT-AC68U in the Dual-WAN load-balancing mode with a 9:1 ratio (I'm not sure the ratio is used at all once you apply routing rules).

    I applied routing rules as follows:
    Screen Shot 2018-12-05 at 21.22.54.png

    , where any outbound connection to the addresses listed here:
    https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362683-Network-Firewall-or-Proxy-Server-Settings-for-Zoom
    , would be routed through WAN 2 (Vodafone)
    And forced the Google DNS servers to be use for the Vodafone WAN as had already done for the Nova WAN.
    And it worked like a charm! Traceroute shows requests to the Zoom endpoints being routed the Vodafone gateway IP. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions and advice!


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