Hosted load balancing - single IP to x # of broadband connections

[MVR]

Good day everyone,

I have setup a dual DSL line for my parents house to help service our massive bandwidth needs for a Dahua (also known as Q-See at Costco, but they sell the wimpiest low performance models using older slower ARM processors). I get my 32 channel NVR's from http://nellyssecurity.com. We have 16 cameras, some are 1080p (2 megapixel) and some are 3 megapixel. We ordered the 2nd DSL line just to keep the main line running at a decent speed so my parents can web browse. Oh, and an important note, they live in the country where we get 6mbit down and 1mbit up and that is only because I had a friend at Frontier Communications (rated the worst ISP in America) break the rules and bump me up from 640k to 1024k. That is about enough to upload 2 cameras at 1 frame per 2 seconds.

So far I've only taken the most simple route. Adding the 2nd DSL router to the network with DHCP disabled of course so the main router (an ASUS RT-AC66u) and pointed its port 37777 to the NVR. With the 6-7mbit down, we can pull around 6 remote cameras (they are out on our farm)...

Ok, I sense I'm getting long winded here. I have considered getting the TP Link Load Balancing Broadband Router TL-R480T+ (Load Balance Broadband Router
TL-R480T+ http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/?categoryid=227&model=TL-R480T+) - It really is an excellent unit for being a consumer priced device. Up to 4 WAN ports with all sorts of load balancing/fail-over/etc features.

Since my parents are out in the country, but live up on a high hill top. I bought a pair of Ubiqiti dish 5.8ghz high power bridges to do a 3.2 mile bridge to a friends house in town that can get 70mbit download and 6mbit upload via Cableone.net. I'd like to combine them all for greater throughput. However, this is not an ideal situation. Since each broadband connection has its own IP address, I have to manually split up the streams to utilize each.

So on to my question. I KNOW for sure I saw a company on the web that offers a hosted single IP address, that can be setup to go over several connections at once and output into a single router to the network. However after weeks of searching I can't find them. I can't remember if they had a specific router of their own or made it work with other devices, but this is truly my goal. A single IP that can transparently load balance over all the connections as if they were one.

In other words:
Hosted IP --> load balancing over all available connections DSL1, DSL2, Cableone.net ----> their custom router (?) --> my network getting a single IP.

The problem is, we have so many remote devices interacting with the NVR32 that it is a big inconvenience to configure the devices to spread across the different IP addresses. What we really need is a single hosted IP that muxes all available lines back as if it were a single ISP connection into our router.

And before anyone suggests it, no I don't want to go with round robin or older balancing methos

So I'm asking for help, I know I came across this company months ago, but I simply can't find them anywhere. I'd be grateful for any help and suggestions. I need a plug and play system like the TP Link (by plug and play I mean, not configuring some high end router that is way out of my league). I'd be grateful for any help and suggestions.

Thanks!

 

[azazel1024]

AFAIK, that takes work on the ISP end. You can't do this with seperate ISPs nor with a load balancing router.

You can either load balance, or you can have individual connections. You cannot mux/bond the connection without the ISP doing work.

 

[kevnich2]

An IP address cannot be hosted. The only way to accomplish what you're ASKING is buy buying your own IP through ARIN and get a BGP connection but that's not utilized for residential connections at all. But there is no such thing as a hosted IP address.

I'm not at all sure why you'd want to stream that many security cameras for a residential house that's in a rural area over the internet constantly anyway, but that's up to you.

 

[MVR]

AFAIK, that takes work on the ISP end. You can't do this with seperate ISPs nor with a load balancing router.You can either load balance, or you can have individual connections. You cannot mux/bond the connection without the ISP doing work.

Hi guys. Yes I am aware that it needs to be on the ISP end. Well actually that isn't correct. There is a company out there that I'm kicking myself for losing the web site address, but yes - they basically dedicate an IP address, and via their interface your specify you 2,3,4+ broadband connections at your site, and I think they provide a router that is configured to accept these incoming connections that is load balanced on their end, combined into a single data stream spanning your local multiple connections. This basically makes it easy for you to configure, for example in our case -- our camera NVR system with the combined bandwidth (minus some overhead of course) so that we can have a single host name -- pointing to their IP -- that then divides that load at the packet level into a single combined mega pipe.

Can anyone else offer helpful info other than "....an IP address cannot be hosted" which is obviously untrue. Or "You cannot mux/bond the connection without the ISP doing work" which I already obviously stated in my original post. A provider specializing in this would have a rack of routers in a data center which could have an incoming IP that was paired up to a remote router waiting to accept the BGP load balanced connections muxing them into one pipe.

By the way, you guys ever heard of "Hide My ***", you pay like $8/mo for a VPN into one of their data centers where all your traffic is hidden to another IP. Mostly used by the torrent type users. I use it as part of my security for some clients to move our IP around because they get some DDoS attacks and the service helps to block that as well as hide the actual location of their server farm.

 

[azazel1024]

Yeah, a VPN is different than muxing lines.

Any router with multiple WAN ports can take multiple IPs down to "one" IP from the inside (its just the IP address of the gateway).

You cannot mux the WAN connections though without both gear designed to do that (expensive/not consumer gear) AND work on the ISP end.

You are sending packets over dispirate networks, it ain't going to work to mux them. All on the same ISP, possibly, but it takes work on THEIR end.

I think you answered your question. You think you remember seeing some magical product that could do this, but can't find it.

Maybe that is the internet trying to give you a hint.

 

[MVR]

Yeah, a VPN is different than muxing lines.
Any router with multiple WAN ports can take multiple IPs down to "one" IP from the inside (its just the IP address of the gateway).
You cannot mux the WAN connections though without both gear designed to do that (expensive/not consumer gear) AND work on the ISP end.
You are sending packets over dispirate networks, it ain't going to work to mux them. All on the same ISP, possibly, but it takes work on THEIR end.
I think you answered your question. You think you remember seeing some magical product that could do this, but can't find it.

I don't understand why you keep telling me that it will require work on the ISP's end. I stated this in my first post. A load balancing router in a data center, configured to match up with a load balancing router on my end. I completely understand this.

Yes, I was quite sure I found a company, I think it was in Europe, that did offer this. Thus the reason for my post to see if anyone else could remember it since I lost the bookmark. I know that a VPN is different, I used that as an example because kevnich2 said an IP address cannot be hosted. Which is an example of what hidemyass.com does. Hosting tons of IP blocks that are temporarily assigned to the user when they connect.

If I cannot find a company that does this (perhaps you are right and it was in my imagination, or they were just offering round robin type solution) - I may have read their product offering wrong, but I do remember it involved a load balancing router at my end to combine incoming traffic. Heck I have network expert friends that could do this. I just don't happen to want to spend huge $ for my own rack space. -- oops lost my train of thought -- if I cannot find a solution, I'll likely go with the TP Link load balancing router, it has great reviews, and it would divide up the incoming traffic (video streams) across the connections, as for pulling the from the site to my NVR/Smartphone/etc - I'd have to just do my own round robin type setup. No biggie, maybe I'll order a 2nd 70mbit/6mbit cable modem and just have enough bandwidth to handle what I need to do, the TP Link should balance things well enuogh.

 

[imagoon]

They are not incorrect by saying an IP can't be "hosted." I think you are talking about route based multipathing but streaming video is not generally a use case for that type of tech.

I have seen products where someone hosts what amounts to an F5 load balancer than then sends connections to mutliple IP addresses that can be on different services but these are typically used for HA where the company can't get its own BGP route group from ARIN. The established connections also only uses one path until the connect completes. Think accessing a webpage. I am not aware of anything that would accept a connection and then multiplex the packets out to to multiple IPs and then inject it in to a network like you are talking about. I am not ever sure how something like that would work (well) when you have multiple connections via multiple carriers that are all different speeds, let alone have some magic box that does all the work for you.

Most people simply don't stream 1080 / 2mp / 3mp to the internet with security systems. They drop the resolution for the net and get the higher res stream in case they have an issue from the DVR as a download.

 

[MVR]

They are not incorrect by saying an IP can't be "hosted." I think you are talking about route based multipathing but streaming video is not generally a use case for that type of tech.

I have seen products where someone hosts what amounts to an F5 load balancer than then sends connections to mutliple IP addresses that can be on different services but these are typically used for HA where the company can't get its own BGP route group from ARIN. The established connections also only uses one path until the connect completes. Think accessing a webpage. I am not aware of anything that would accept a connection and then multiplex the packets out to to multiple IPs and then inject it in to a network like you are talking about. I am not ever sure how something like that would work (well) when you have multiple connections via multiple carriers that are all different speeds, let alone have some magic box that does all the work for you.

Most people simply don't stream 1080 / 2mp / 3mp to the internet with security systems. They drop the resolution for the net and get the higher res stream in case they have an issue from the DVR as a download.

I'm basically talking about a bridge where the single IP, managed upstream. Websites or anything external wouldn't see the requests coming from different ISP's. Just bonding the 3 connections to a head end at a data center or major bandwidth hosting site. Once a stream starts on a socket, it wouldn't be split - it would be assigned to a pipe and continue on that pipe, the next video stream may go over another pipe once that one has some traffic on it. Just like the TP Link does, say you go to speedtest.net and the flash module opens up 5 or so http streams, if the load balancing is working right the streams would spread across the available connections. .. However in my example, I'd basically have a VPN of some sort from a router at a data center, using each pipe, to bond into a single pipe.. In other words, the ISP itself wouldn't be serving any data from the net, it would all be serviced by the router at the head end, to the router at the home that is configured to understand its only job is to take the 3+ pipes given to it, and load balance the traffic across them accordingly.

"Most people simply don't stream 1080 / 2mp / 3mp to the internet with security systems. "
-- I'm not most people. I have 16 1080p and 3mp cameras on my property, and I watch 6 cameras of the same resolution from our farm and parents home. I'm a lucky guy, I have 50mbit VDSL2+ down and 25mbit up. I'm constantly pulling in 28mbit of remote video data, and repeating out 13mbit of that video to other NVR clients that want to see the same content. It is actually quite nice, like having a window to my childhood home and farm in high def 24/7. Monitors around my house can see it, and in my office I have a fanless LED projector showing them all on a 70" view on the wall.

Each camera with near lossless compression wants 8mbit, but I turn the bit rate down to 2.5mbit for both network savings and hard drive storage. 8TB of storage in the 32 channel NVR and can only save 34 days of video. Move that to 8mbit and drops to like 9 days

5-7mp cameras (bullet sized) will show up mid 2015. Utterly beautiful. Can read a license plate at 15-20 feet. The 3mp cameras only make up 1 out of 6 of my camera installs and have a wonderfully wide and crisp view. Now if Dahua would upgrade their NVR's to output in 4k.

Since it sounds like I won't be able to do a single IP hosted at a major hub and combine them without spending major cash, I'll probably just go with the TP Link load balancer. It is configurable enough that I should be able to at least pull down streams automatically balancing across the DSL1 DSL2 and Cable modem, then I'll just have to setup my remote pulls of the video streams over DSL 2 and cable modem leaving DSL1 mostly free for everyday things. That or just set the QoS so the video traffic on port 37777 has the lowest priority keeping everything else speedy. Good review of the device here. http://youtu.be/YDUfP8a5zNY?t=3m31s

 

[drebo]

Technically, it's feasible, but it wouldn't be cost-effective for residential purposes.

 

[imagoon]

I'm basically talking about a bridge where the single IP, managed upstream. Websites or anything external wouldn't see the requests coming from different ISP's. Just bonding the 3 connections to a head end at a data center or major bandwidth hosting site. Once a stream starts on a socket, it wouldn't be split - it would be assigned to a pipe and continue on that pipe, the next video stream may go over another pipe once that one has some traffic on it. Just like the TP Link does, say you go to speedtest.net and the flash module opens up 5 or so http streams, if the load balancing is working right the streams would spread across the available connections. .. However in my example, I'd basically have a VPN of some sort from a router at a data center, using each pipe, to bond into a single pipe.. In other words, the ISP itself wouldn't be serving any data from the net, it would all be serviced by the router at the head end, to the router at the home that is configured to understand its only job is to take the 3+ pipes given to it, and load balance the traffic across them accordingly.

"Most people simply don't stream 1080 / 2mp / 3mp to the internet with security systems. "
-- I'm not most people. I have 16 1080p and 3mp cameras on my property, and I watch 6 cameras of the same resolution from our farm and parents home. I'm a lucky guy, I have 50mbit VDSL2+ down and 25mbit up. I'm constantly pulling in 28mbit of remote video data, and repeating out 13mbit of that video to other NVR clients that want to see the same content. It is actually quite nice, like having a window to my childhood home and farm in high def 24/7. Monitors around my house can see it, and in my office I have a fanless LED projector showing them all on a 70" view on the wall.

Each camera with near lossless compression wants 8mbit, but I turn the bit rate down to 2.5mbit for both network savings and hard drive storage. 8TB of storage in the 32 channel NVR and can only save 34 days of video. Move that to 8mbit and drops to like 9 days

5-7mp cameras (bullet sized) will show up mid 2015. Utterly beautiful. Can read a license plate at 15-20 feet. The 3mp cameras only make up 1 out of 6 of my camera installs and have a wonderfully wide and crisp view. Now if Dahua would upgrade their NVR's to output in 4k.

Like I mentioned, you are looking for a route based load balancer, operating in an single arm mode. You would then need a wan consolidator at the other end that also was doing something similar to single arm. Otherwise the NAT / PAT would likely confuse the device. I am not aware of any company that just gives you a simple box. There is no way to verify that this would even work. The Dahua may not even open multiple streams. Since you only mention the IP port, my hopes wouldn't be that high that it does because that is not typically NAT friendly.

And besides the "cool factor" why are you doing this? It sounds like a huge waste of money otherwise. At least that is my opinion.

 

[MVR]

Like I mentioned, you are looking for a route based load balancer, operating in an single arm mode. You would then need a wan consolidator at the other end that also was doing something similar to single arm. Otherwise the NAT / PAT would likely confuse the device. I am not aware of any company that just gives you a simple box. There is no way to verify that this would even work. The Dahua may not even open multiple streams. Since you only mention the IP port, my hopes wouldn't be that high that it does because that is not typically NAT friendly.

And besides the "cool factor" why are you doing this? It sounds like a huge waste of money otherwise. At least that is my opinion.

Thanks for the info. Perhaps I was hallucinating. But I was sure I was reading about a company in Europe doing this. Combining several WAN connections to a box you buy from them, and they accept all the tunneled traffic hosting it as a virtual ISP / IP to you. I'm sure I'll find it a year from now by accident.

As for your last comment. Yes it is cool factor, and the cost is very low. $20 per DSL line, $40 for the cable modem account. We use the system for both security and, well.. simply enjoying the view. We can monitor the farm, and even each others homes when away. For example, when my parents are away from their house -- I can watch over my grandmothers mini-house next to theirs to see if she heads out for a walk and falls. I pull their key camera feeds to record to my NVR in case someone breaks in and finds their hidden DVR. Their NVR records my front door cam and back yard. Watching over my place when I am gone. Since I have no bandwidth cap on my vDSL2+, might as well have fun with it.

"The Dahua may not even open multiple streams." - it opens an individual stream per camera with the only limit being 20 streams per channel on the NVR. I can see them in netstat on my ASUS RT-AC66u. Works like a charm. So technically with the TP Link as it opened channels to the various remote camera sites, it would very likely start to divide them up among the WAN ports.