[Bloat] Dual WAN home router with decent SQM?

[David Lang]

On Mon, 5 Jun 2023, John D wrote:

> My scenario is upgrading from DSL (35/8mbps) to StarLink (150/15mbps) so I
> really only need a failover - keep the DSL as it's cheap.
>
> My question though is how quickly will failover occur? I work over RDP &
> Teams all day and I'm unclear if failover should give me near seamless
> service, or kicks in after things already stopped working.

it's not seamless, for two reasons.

1. it takes time to detect that the connectivity is down

if it's the local wire breaking, your router can detect the loss of the link, 
but if it's a problem further up in the ISP, you can only detect it by sending a 
ping and having it not respond. It's common to send such pings every minute or 
so, which limits how quickly you can detect a failure. It's also common to wait 
for a couple failures so that you don't fail over due to a single dropped 
packet. (as noted below, failovers are not going to be transparent, so a short 
outage is preferrable to a false failover)

2. zoom/teams/RDP/etc will need to see their connection fail and reconnect.

Since you have two ISPs and don't have BGP across them, you have a different IP 
address on each ISP, so when you shift from one to the other, existing 
connections have to fail and when they are re-established, they show up to the 
other end as the new IP.

It's not something that you want to have happen during a meeting, and it won't 
cover for the few-second outages that Starlink sometimes has, but it does cover 
longer outages.


now, you can set things up so that you have a VPN over each of the connections 
to a VM you run on a hosted service somewhere and failover from one VPN leg to 
the other and the remote end will not realize this due to the NAT being done on 
your remote VM. But that's a lot more work to setup and has it's own set of 
'interesting' problems.

David Lang
P.S. reply-to-all is common.


> (Ps: I'm unsure of etiquette on this list, should I reply all or reply back
> to the list only every time)
>
> On Mon, Jun 5, 2023, 17:06 Luis A. Cornejo <luis.a.cornejo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I’ve done the multi wan with mwan3 and it works fine for load balance or
>> failover.
>>
>> But if you are trying to improve your upload then the best you can get is
>> one upload vs the other. You won’t get both uploads to the same stream,
>> that is bonding, which is a little harder to do.
>>
>> -Luis
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 4, 2023 at 9:35 AM David Lang via Bloat <
>> bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>
>>> any router that you can run OpenWRT on will do the job
>>> look at the mwan3 package to mange the multiple ISPs
>>>
>>> at 100Mb, you don't need an especially beefy router.
>>>
>>> David Lang
>>>
>>> On Sun, 4 Jun 2023, John D
>>> via Bloat wrote:
>>>
>>>> Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2023 09:48:21 +0100
>>>> From: John D via Bloat <bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net>
>>>> Reply-To: John D <j.w.r.dexter at gmail.com>
>>>> To: bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net
>>>> Subject: [Bloat] Dual WAN home router with decent SQM?
>>>>
>>>> I want to set up a new home router with SQM support to alleviate (mostly
>>>> upload) bloat.
>>>> However I would also like dual ISP support, more for backup/failover
>>> than
>>>> load sharing.
>>>> I can see affordable multi wan "load balancer" routers eg TP-link, and
>>>> affordable SQM routers such as ubiquity Edgerouter, but I'm struggling
>>> to
>>>> find a single device providing both.
>>>> Just after any advice on a) am I better having two separate components
>>> b)
>>>> if so any suggestions which product/brand?
>>>> Two devices means more configuration but possibly more flexible and
>>> cheaper.
>>>>
>>>> My internet speed is looking to max out around 100/20mbps so I don't
>>> need
>>>> Gbit performance. Thanks for any help.
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>