Home office WAN Aggregation/Bonding Options

[cocyclist]

All -

I am hoping I might be able to get some opinions on my situation. Thanks to COVID, I'm probably going to be working from home for quite awhile if not for ever. I'm in a rural area, but have fixed wireless and 4g options. I've been using 4g for awhile, but ATT just recently locked down/changed hardware, and blacklisted my account since it was for ipad only.

So my next best option is fixed wireless. I have two 25u/25d links and would like to do some sort of link bonding/aggregation. Not load balancing, but rather true aggregation.

I would prefer to run something in a VM so I can add multiple WANS (maybe throw a 4g modem into the mix too), but am open to hardware options like Peplink if there isn't any significant monthly reoccuring costs and they have streaming optimization of some kind built in for the family streaming needs.

What options are out there? So far, all I have found that isn't too expensive for my home office use case is Peplink (Hardware) and VipriNet (SD-Wan). Any others you could recommend? Any other words of advice as I go down this path? My home has about 50 devices in it and there is a total of 6 of us in the house. We use roughly 350-450gb a month with a large chunk of that being streaming. I would prefer bonding bandwidth of at least 150mb so I can aggregate 1 or 2 4g as well which is out of reach of the cheaper peplink products like the balance one.

Any advice or alternatives (other than moving!) would be appreciated greatly.

 

[dandanio]

peplink/pepwave?
This is the only sane solution I have seen really working well.
Any other aggregators have issues, usually. Bond those channels, set up a permanent VPN and you are done.

 

[randman]

I've been really happy with Peplink in terms of their software and reliability. My use case is a little bit different than yours. I have a dual WAN router. I use a cable modem for my primary WAN and 4G LTE for my secondary WAN. For my secondary WAN, I use a Pepwave MAX BR1 Mini, which takes a SIM card and connects via Ethernet to my main router. In my use case, the Pepwave is only used for failover when my cable modem becomes unavailable. Pepwave has a slew of other routers, so no need for a separate router in addition to the Pepwave. I'm impressed with the functionality that Pepwave routers provide, and the software and hardware is very reliable (from my experience with the MAX BR1 Mini at least). I can't comment on their bonding functionality, since my use case is for failover. Pepwave has their SpeedFusion technology for bonding, but it's at an added cost (although they had a free limited time offer at one point due to COVID). I don't know much about their SpeedFusion, since I don't need it for my use case. Some Peplink routers support multiple LTE cards (even from different vendors) simultaneously, but not sure if it's true bonding or just load balancing.

Maybe something from their Balance Series would be a place to start: Balance Series - Built-In Survival Mechanism. No more connectivity failure. .

 

[tiernano]

Can i ask a potentially stupid question here... looking at this for an office, we have 2 links: a 450mb/s and a 300mb/s link, both symmetrical. i need 2 of these devices, once in the office and, say, one in a datacenter, but i would need a Balance 305 or above before i could get the bandwidth i need, right? the balance 305 says "1gb router throughput" which would be the closest to what i would need bandwidth wise, correct?

But if in a home office environment, say i wanted it in the house to connect to the office... my internet the house is (potentially) 1Gb/s... so the balance 210 would stop at 350mb/s for the connection... am i right in those thoughs?

 

[randman]

TBH , I was also wondering exactly what they mean by throughput in their specs since the numbers are low for people with Gigabit WANs, unless you go up to more expensive models. In my case, I use a Peplink with a 4G LTE SIM card as backup to another (1GbE) router with cable modem. So, the throughout of the Peplink model that I got was way more than needed for a 4G LTE bandwidth. But, if I were looking for a Peplink to handle my cable modem as well, then I would worry about what exactly throughput meant.

you can send Peplink a question. When I did before, I got a quick response from a company that sells their products. It was a 3rd party vendor, but they were very technically knowledgeable about Peplink products. Also, the Peplink forums have very good contributors.

 

[tiernano]

Thanks. Ill drop them a mail and see what they say... was kind of thinking of it for our office, given we may be moving to a datacenter at some stage, but also for home user... pricing will probably stop those thoughts, especially if i need a larger box capable of 2gb routing...

 

[randman]

I saw this thread discussion at poplin's forum regarding throughput: Router Throughput