I am looking for the best solution to bond (not load balance) my ADSL connection and my Cable Broadband connection in a home office environment.
ADSL connection is a 25m/2m service.
Cable connection is a 65m/5m service.
While your Load balancing logarithms are interesting and can help, a bonded service would be nice when both services are working.
I do a fair amount of online gaming so low latency is really important. The ADSL will typically be the better connection in this regard. In a bonded environment, what happens to the latency if WAN1 is pinging 23ms while WAN2 is pinging 125?
As a web developer, there is a fair amount of download and uploading of video tutorials. This is where the bonded service would be really nice. A 90/7 connection would be very helpful in these situations.
Also, while the ADSL service is steady and relatively consistent, my cable connection is ALL OVER THE PLACE. There is multiple drops during the day and their bandwidth and latency is greatly dependant on the time of day with evenings being the worst as people are coming home and loading up their Hulu and Netflix.
So I really like the features of load balancing, but I would not want to leave extra bandwidth on the table that a Bonded service can give me. I am looking for advise on the best solution for my situation.
HI, Further to TK’s response I would suggest the Balance One as a good fit for your requirements since its dual WAN, has high throughput capability with gigabit Ethernet and has in built wifi.
Its also worth mentioning that you can have really granular control over how the WAN links are used and by which devices for which types of traffic using outbound policies.
You could for example have a global rule that prioritises general internet traffic out over the cable connection (with overflow to DSL), and another rule that prioritises the DSL WAN for your gaming traffic (automatically using the lowest latency algorithm, or manually using the priority algorithm), you can target the gaming traffic by destination IP/Subnet.
Even with just load balancing then you will be able to optimize the use of your WANs to give you a much better user experience.
Sorry to hijack, dumb question. I have 2 Balance 305s and a Balance 30 (all at different sites, not speed fusioned to each other) but they all do the same thing… for example the first 305 had 2 25/5 connections and a 6/1 connection and I can download a file at 53mbit, is that not bonding? Speed tests show the same results… depending on which speedtest server I connect to, some will only max out one wan connection, and some will max out all 3.
Hi so the answer lies in the differences between how online speedtest services work. Some services will use a single session for bandwidth testing. When run, these will max out at the bandwidth of the single link that the single session has been automatically load balanced across. Other services will use multiple sessions in the test. Those multiple sessions can be load balanced across all available links with each session consuming all the bandwidth that’s available on each available link giving you the impression of bonding - in fact this is application level aggregation of the available WAN links.
Without a form of network level bonding - like our SpeedFusion VPN bonding technology, a single IP Session can only ever use the available bandwidth on a single link at any one time. With VPN bonding, a single IP session is distributed at a packet level (rather than a session level) across all available WAN links and so can use all the available bandwidth (minus a VPN overhead), so long as the traffic source and destination can send a receive at those speeds.
This is why we recommend the use of download managers when using a single device for load balancing across multiple WANs, A download manager splits the source file you want to download into multiple chunks and creates multiple sessions to download those chunks in parallel- sticking the chunks back together again once all of the source file has been downloaded (in the same way bittorrent clients do). Because it is using multiple sessions, a download manager can consume bandwidth from all WAN links simultaneously.