Question WAN aggregation of LTE & WiFi

[allen675]

Hello,

I need a little help please. I thought I had this figured out however I am getting intermittent problems and think I may have some conflicts. What I'm trying to do may not even be possible?

The scenario: I have a Vigor 2925n, a tp link archer m200 LTE router and a ubiquiti nanostation m2. What I want to achieve is an aggregated connection from the m200(LTE) & Nanostation (WiFi) to use when I'm at a site in my RV/motorhome. Now I thought seeing as the Vigor has two Ethernet WAN ports and the ability to session balance that this would be achievable. I've set both the archer and nanostation up on their own separate subnets to try to avoid any conflicts in router mode with DHCP enabled.

Now it may be clear from my post that I'm no expert and am hoping that someone can help ie not possible don't waste your time or yes it's possible and this is how it's done because it's starting to hurt my brain!

 

[JackMDS]

If you goal is to get one combined connection it can not be achieved unless you have a service with an ISP that provies this fupe of function.

Loadbalance Internet Connections

www.ezlan.net

 

[allen675]

Thanks so far for the feedback and help. I managed to figure out the error of my ways. I had an IP conflict. The network I was accessing (router IP address 192.168.2.1) for testing purposes with the nanostation (192.168.2.1) had the same IP address! As for the link that you sent to me jackMDS the webpage makes reference to a multi WAN router which the vigor 2925 has and the ability to session balance across the two.

 

[SamirD]

Seems like you've figure out the issue, but I'll add in some experience with working with multi-wan since the mid-2000s.

You will never see a combined bandwidth on a single stream connection, like a single file transfer. However, if you transfer two files, you can max out the total bandwidth via these 2 streams. Basically, instead of having one pipe of x bandwidth, you have two pipes of x and y bandwidth that can be used simultaneously. This works well on modern web pages, which can have hundreds of small objects, files, etc that need to be downloaded. Where multi-wan fall short is for single large file transfers, but still works well if you have a lot of these files to transfer.

The other issue you can run across with multi-wan is that any secure sessions will break if the sessions change from one wan connection to the other, and unless you bind the sessions to one wan or another, this can constantly occur.

My use case back then was uploading thousands of photos I shot every weekend. At the time I was generating many GB of data each weekend, all of which needed to be uploaded as fast as possible. The fastest cable modems at the time available to me was 8M/384k so I got 3 of them and a cisco rv016. Using 6 computers, I could saturate the upload bandwidth with simultaneous uploads. Later on, the web uploader of the service I was using improved so it would natively transfer 2x threads simultaneously, so I dropped down to using 3 computers. Later the speeds on my modems jumped up to 25/5 so I dropped one of the modems. Today, my needs have changed since I haven't shot photos in years, but I still use multiple wan connections for redundancy and multiple ip vpn tunnels with dedicated bandwidth, and now use a enterprise grade watchguard router to handle all this.