Dual Wan with 3G load ballance with QOS + more

Its_Me

Its_Me

Its_Me

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Interested in peoples thoughts on this.

A friend is hitting his data limit (50Gig pcm) with his 18meg tooway Satellite.
His adsl is very poor as he is out in the sticks (technically he should not even have it), but the 3G signal is not too shabby.

The issue is streaming movie mostly, but it seems he has been using the Satellite connection as primary for all devices (I am sure they use icloud too). So some load balance is required.

Looking at some smart load balance options of Dual Wan with 3G thrown in the mix too. But don't want the 3G as a fail over only.

So we have;
18Meg Satellite (50gig pcm) broadband.
0.4Meg ADSL
Potentially good 3G on EE

Any router that has a smart capability based on type of request (i.e web pages, streams, youtube etc) & stream load ?
 
TBH the satellites actually very good, plus its on contract now anyway.
I suspect byt the time its contract expires, 3G/4G will have greatly improved.

But still need the load balance option.
The 3G is not currently fast enough for streaming HD.
 
Its for home use, but when you consider the satelite is a tad over £100pcm, and going over limit is £15 per Gig.
Would be hard to justify anything over 1K, ideally max £500ish.
 
Could you get away with load balancing based on the local (or remote) IP address? If you can, then assuming the satellite connects using Ethernet, a Vigor 2830 and a 3G dongle could work.
 
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Yes, I could, but then may aswel have multiple SSID for each connection and have manual switchign depending upon what the person is doing.
IP or MAC based would mean some devices would not be able to stream at all.
Goto be a smarter solution i would have thought.
 
bremen1874 said:
If you now the IP addresses (or ranges) that the streaming services use then a 2830 could automatically switch between WAN connections based on that.
Click to expand...

Thats is one way the QOS could be achieved, did not see this feature in the brief product info and very interesting.

So you can assign the DNS request to use a specific WAN connection ?
How does it accomplish this, DNS reverse lookup or something ?
 
The configuration allows you to select the WAN connection to use based on the local, remote or both IP addresses.

For example you could tell it to always send traffic destined for 74.125.227.96-74.125.227.110 (youtube.com) to WAN2 but leave all other traffic going to WAN1.

The main problem would be the admin. It only works on IP addresses so someone would need to keep it updated. It's a shame that it doesn't accept domain names as that would be much simpler.

It's also worth noting that I haven't tried this in anger.
 
Hmm, then I don' think its the solution I am looking for. Thanks anyway bremen.

If it was for me, i could cope with updating the (DNS) IP, but I want something that would work by request type, or DNS.
 
I too was going to suggest Draytek (2830 if you want a built in ADSL modem or 2920 if you want dual ethernet) but as you want more dymanic traffic analysis, rather than plain load balancing, I doubt that's what you're after.
 
So you want a dynamic solution to switch between internet links depending on content? As this is mainly for movies I would say just use snail mail. Lovefilm. £500 is a lot of rentals! If they are still hitting 50gb a month watching youtube. . .

On the ADSL note at 0.4mbit ISP's and phone providers can often tweak this a bit. Changing router and micro filters can get more. I used to be 0.6mbit out in the sticks. Changed router to a linksys modem, and a wall filter rather than the exchange adapter and got this up to 1.3mbit. Still not super speed but big difference to what I had.
 
Thanks, for input.

ADSl is already tweaked to its limit without falling over ;)

I would like to find a solution to the streaming problem rather then just state the obvious about using DVD/Blueray.
Also this does not really work well with his AV distribution.

one other alternative is put a parallel Sat in :o
 
Build an appliance. Some cheap hardware and something like pfSense, m0n0wall etc.

You could have very fine granular control over which gateway traffic gets sent to with something like pfSense, using firewall rules perhaps.

QoS on pfSense is a total ballache though, it is on most things however and is never true QoS. Just a half-implementation.

Pf Sense will also let you alias a URL to use in firewall rules, although it will only resolve when the rules load. Otherwise you can alias a block of IPs, for example YouTubes address space and direct traffic that way. Using Layer7 for youtube is probably a no go however, it uses HTTP to buffer and not streamed with RTSP. Might match on http-video though!
 
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Thanks Sin, already had looked at pfSense.

Seemed a little OP for what I wanted (number of connections) and was sure there must be a product available that would accomplish close to my requirements.
 
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