We load balance using Mikrotiks and it works great for our purpose. Having access to 2 FTTC lines which both sync at 80/20, I struggle to see why I'd need to bond them for higher individual "single thread" download speed as individually each line is capable of downloading plenty data and we get redundancy with the load balance configuration.

On FTTC I can see bonding being particularly useful to make it possible to access increased upload speeds of greater than 20Mb.

There is apparently a very nasty router hack, with the prime victims being Mikrotiks.

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technol...
and
https://securelist.com/apt-slingshot/84312/

(Links courtesy of AdrianPH).

Edited by RobertoS (Sat 17-Mar-18 20:18:38)

I've asked the question on the IRC, whether I'll get a response tonight is another question but as soon as I get an answer I'll edit this post to mention what the response was.

I imagined it was pretty much making the same IP's route down two or more lines via clueless and then a bit of work for me to do on the router to support this fully. Maybe I'm wrong but we'll see, hopefully I'm not.

EDIT: Someone has confirmed on IRC that while they obviously charge for the additional service (e.g. VDSL2, line rental or whatever else that usually applies), they don't charge for bonding on top.

Edited by Ixel (Sat 17-Mar-18 20:40:32)

Thanks for links, will read up on it.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

There is apparently a very nasty router hack, with the prime victims being Mikrotiks.

Mikrotik fixed the bug with release 6.38.5 of RouterOS at the beginning of March 2017, so if people haven't been applying updates for 12 months they're making a rod for their own back. Apparently there were only about a 100 infections in the wild - since 2012. And the version of Winbox needed for the attack is an old version from before 2014.

Edited by Spud2003 (Sun 18-Mar-18 00:41:13)

That�s good. But odd that Kaspersky are only now telling the world.

There is no charge for bonding.

As long as the lines are on the same login they will bond automatically if you send a block of IPs to both lines in the control panel.

You can have multiple blocks and send one for bonding and one to each line if you like.

If you have a FireBrick at each end you can to tunnel bonding, even over separate ISPs

It's very powerful.

Last time I bonded 2 ISP's I had a Linksys router which literally was meant to go into a DC rack. It did a good job but I lost it years ago I think. If I can find it I will do that again as a cheaper option

Edited by deleted (Sun 18-Mar-18 08:28:07)

Lots of good info here:

https://support.aa.net.uk/Category:Bonding

Linking lines for download looks fairly straightforward but there's not much info on upload bonding.

Were you bonding or just load balancing? Bonding across two ISPs would need some kind of tunnel in place to access the primary ISP via the secondary one?

Perhaps you were just load balancing ie sending requests via the different links based on the router's choice of path? I tried this with a Draytek router when I had access to an ADSL and a DOCSIS connection. It worked OK until I tried accessing secure sites such as banking etc as the traffic from be via different IPs was rejected of course. By the time I'd set rules up for specific protocols to go via different routes I decided it wasn't worth the bother!