4G/WAN Load Balancing - Hardware Choices

Not entirely sure where to post this question so apologies if it's in the wrong place.

A friend wishes to have internet (currently on BT Infinity) and add 4G with failover and possibly load balancing between the two for his small business. However we are uncertain as to what the most suitable hardware choices might be. Currently it's a Draytek Vigor 2860 and gets about 50-60Mb/s.

Options seem to be:

1) Specialised 4G Router with WAN capability such as a ProRoute H900,
2) A Draytek Vigor 2927lac,
3) Hang a USB 4G modem off the existing router but that seems a bit messy and may have limitations.

Are there other/better options? We are not sure if the Vigor will do load balancing between the VDSL and 4G. The ProRoute will (I think) but their website is appalingly bad and it's not 100% clear from the H900 manual (also appallingly bad).

We'd also have to put a VDSL Modem in: choices seem to be limited - either a Vigor 166 or a Netgear DM200. Are there other options?

Does anyone have experience doing this? I realise that l may not be asking all the right questions but any advice would be much appreciated.

Chris

Try option number 3 to start with. Draytek 2860 routers are designed to do load balancing as well as failover - see https://www.draytek.co.uk/information/solutions/load...

I used a Vigor 2860 to load balance ADSL and 4G for a couple of years - the 2860 is very competent at load balancing. I used a Mikrotik 4G router, but if you have a good signal it should work with a 4G dongle (as long as it is one of the supported ones).

In reply to a post by ChrisON:

Currently it's a Draytek Vigor 2860 and gets about 50-60Mb/s.

I've got a Draytek 2862 that I used originally with ADSL and 4G backup and now with Gigaclear FTTP and 4G backup. There's a list of 4G dongles that have been tested on the Draytek support pages. I'm using a Huawei Unlocked E3372 with a Three SIM card in it. The automatic failover mostly works, but did have one recent failure when I needed to unplug/replug the dongle to get it to kick in.

Throughput wise the Draytek is pretty solid. Provided hardware acceleration is turned on it happily keeps up with the Gigaclear 300Mbps. For 4G in this area with the dongle on a short USB lead and sat on a downstairs window cill with a 4 out of five bars signal strength I get about 40Mbps down and up. It's good enough as a backup and kept me online when rodents chewed through the Gigaclear fibre.

/me looks at your nick, and wonders if it was jealous relatives did the chewing. 😎😂