Broadband Bonding and Aggregation

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Bobby Dazzler

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Does anyone have any experience of bonding or aggregating broadband lines (at home), and can offer advice on how to go about it?

I’m looking at a property with limited broadband speeds so I thought combining multiple broadband lines might be an option.

Thoughts and suggestions would be much appreciated.
 
Does anyone have any experience of bonding or aggregating broadband lines (at home), and can offer advice on how to go about it?

I’m looking at a property with limited broadband speeds so I thought combining multiple broadband lines might be an option.

Thoughts and suggestions would be much appreciated.
I would guess its expensive for the speed increase you get?
 
I don’t know how much bonding costs but we use a leased line at work. It’s about £350 pm plus vat. It means you have a dedicated line that you are not sharing with other users. It’s been a great stop gap until fibre is finally available in central London.
 
If you're expecting an increase in outright speed you're probably going to be disappointed - when it comes to aggregation 1+1 doesn't equal 2.

Where aggregation works well is with load from multiple clients - hence you tend to see it more in business environments than the home.
 
If you're expecting an increase in outright speed you're probably going to be disappointed - when it comes to aggregation 1+1 doesn't equal 2.

Where aggregation works well is with load from multiple clients - hence you tend to see it more in business environments than the home.
Any idea what 1+1 might equal as a ball park estimate?

It’s less about speed it’s more about capacity, as there will be a very large number of Internet connected devices. Most will pass tiny amounts of data, however there will be a relatively large number of HD security cameras uploading to the cloud and so I suspect that the current maximum ~18 Mbps (up) will be over stretched.with just cameras.

The alternative might be to have two or three completely separate WiFi networks one or two for cameras and one for everything else, but I’d prefer to manage it as one physical network if possible, with a virtual network for cameras, another for things, a third for personal devices and finally a fourth for guests.
 
As Dickster has said, aggregation only works when you have lots of devices. Each device can go in/out of one connection. With aggregations, things like voip tend not to work properly.
 
Any idea what 1+1 might equal as a ball park estimate?

It’s less about speed it’s more about capacity, as there will be a very large number of Internet connected devices. Most will pass tiny amounts of data, however there will be a relatively large number of HD security cameras uploading to the cloud and so I suspect that the current maximum ~18 Mbps (up) will be over stretched.with just cameras.

The alternative might be to have two or three completely separate WiFi networks one or two for cameras and one for everything else, but I’d prefer to manage it as one physical network if possible, with a virtual network for cameras, another for things, a third for personal devices and finally a fourth for guests.

Single user peak, pretty much 1. As an analogy, what you're doing is adding another lane on the motorway rather than upping the speed limit. However, for the purposes of what you're looking to do it sounds like it will be succesful - you're not overly worried about the maximum speed, just how much you can get down it at once.

Managing the networks at/inside the property is largely unrelated to this (aside, definitely something I would do - I run separate vlans for my personal, IoT and work networks, each with their own dedicated wlan), what you're concentrating on here is the connection to the front door (i.e. the router/modem). Managing the in/out flow of traffic from the "site" network will be largely down to what importance is placed on resilience etc
 
Single user peak, pretty much 1. As an analogy, what you're doing is adding another lane on the motorway rather than upping the speed limit. However, for the purposes of what you're looking to do it sounds like it will be succesful - you're not overly worried about the maximum speed, just how much you can get down it at once.
That’s good to hear. Yes it’s capacity I need rather than speed, so using your analogy I need more lanes rather than a higher speed limit.
 
Managing the networks at/inside the property is largely unrelated to this (aside, definitely something I would do - I run separate vlans for my personal, IoT and work networks, each with their own dedicated wlan), what you're concentrating on here is the connection to the front door (i.e. the router/modem). Managing the in/out flow of traffic from the "site" network will be largely down to what importance is placed on resilience etc
That’s exactly how I have it set up at home, segregated exactly as you have, and it works well. I use the ISP’s router as a modem only and have a separate WiFi solution which is more flexible but also more straightforward for a simpleton like me to manage.

Part of the appeal regarding bonding/aggregating was to add some resilience with two ISPs and a 4g/5g router.

Any thoughts on a box of tricks to do the magic?
 
4G/5G to Wi-Fi router not an option here?
Signal too weak to use for capacity but when bonded it’s perhaps good enough for resilience option in the event that the broadband goes down.
 
That’s exactly how I have it set up at home, segregated exactly as you have, and it works well. I use the ISP’s router as a modem only and have a separate WiFi solution which is more flexible but also more straightforward for a simpleton like me to manage.

Part of the appeal regarding bonding/aggregating was to add some resilience with two ISPs and a 4g/5g router.

Any thoughts on a box of tricks to do the magic?

What are you using to do the segregation and routing? The majority of home/ISP supplied equipment doesn't really cut the mustard, the common choice for balanced performance and cost is something BSD-based but this does require a little bit of effort to work with.

I'm running pfsense on an HP thin client that I've fitted with an Intel server NIC, but there's off the shelf hardware that will also support it (and other similar software packages)
 
I’m not sure it’s the solution you’re after, but our router allows us to limit the bandwidth used by each device (individually set) - which is great when your kids are otherwise hogging bandwidth!! My son is an avid pc gamer and tends to use a lot.
 
Starlink any use to you? A number of guys on the Tesla forums seem to be getting decent results
 
Starlink any use to you? A number of guys on the Tesla forums seem to be getting decent results
Although the whole of the UK is green in the coverage map, when I tried to place an order it says that it’s not available 🙁
 
Really late to the party on this one but rather than aggregating/bonding connections it sounds like you are looking to load balance. Maybe look at picking up a Draytek Vigor 2860/2862 router used on eBay, these are triple WAN routers and highly configurable. They have a VDSL modem built in, you can add an Openreach VDSL modem (or Vigor 130 if you find one cheap) to connect a second fibre line and they have USB for mobile dongle if you want a failover.

You can then configure the connections in load balance mode, you can either specify that certain IP/IP ranges use one connection and others use the other (you can set it up so if one line goes down they will failover to the other line) or you can let the router manage all of the load balancing and you set whether it balances based on sessions or IP.

This is a cheap way to make the most of what normal connections you can get there, leased line would be awesome but they tend to be way too expensive for homes.
 
Really late to the party on this one but rather than aggregating/bonding connections it sounds like you are looking to load balance. Maybe look at picking up a Draytek Vigor 2860/2862 router used on eBay, these are triple WAN routers and highly configurable. They have a VDSL modem built in, you can add an Openreach VDSL modem (or Vigor 130 if you find one cheap) to connect a second fibre line and they have USB for mobile dongle if you want a failover.

You can then configure the connections in load balance mode, you can either specify that certain IP/IP ranges use one connection and others use the other (you can set it up so if one line goes down they will failover to the other line) or you can let the router manage all of the load balancing and you set whether it balances based on sessions or IP.

This is a cheap way to make the most of what normal connections you can get there, leased line would be awesome but they tend to be way too expensive for homes.
Thank you for such a comprehensive reply - I’ll Google the device you mentioned 👍🏻
 
I used to use my old BT link along with a 4G connection, load balanced through my Untangle firewall running on an old PC, used to work pretty well, but then I moved to Starlink and dumped BT/4G.
 

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