Second Line for Load Balancing

Hi I want to load balance across 2 FTTC lines I have the draytek vigor 2060 which will allow me to connect the 1st vdsl line directly and the second wan port via the providers broadband router. The vigor will then allow balancing across the vdsl and wan port.

I will need a second line installing for the second vdsl connection (Ive had two phone lines in the past)

Question is if I had two phone lines in the past is that two separate copper to the cabinet? or to they share the one copper to make two lines?

Will I get 2 x 70 meg into the router 70meg being my download that I can get on average

If the cabinet fails I lose my internet but if there is a problem at the exchange with one of my providers I presumably will be ok if I use two different LLU providers?

Has anyone else adopted this approach ?

Thanks in advance

That will be two separate lines back to the exchange, two line rental charges etc.

Cheaper line rental charge £10 a month with no contract.

http://freeola.com/line-rental/

Load balancing for performance or redundancy reasons?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Load balancing for performance or redundancy reasons?

Performance mostly

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

That will be two separate lines back to the exchange, two line rental charges etc.

Ok thank you

Okay so VDSL2 from one firm that uses BT Wholesale, and then whichever LLU provider or seller has their own network.

Remember load balancing just means each download can max out each line, rather than making a single file/download faster.

For redundancy best to do one VDSL2 and one ADSL2+, thus even if cabinet gets destroyed by car accident your ADSL2+ carries on working, but you can also do with this a 4G dongle and some load balances will take multiple connection options

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Remember load balancing just means each download can max out each line, rather than making a single file/download faster.

You can use a download manager to download over the 2 connections to make a single file/download faster.

Ok you guys have now got me rethinking.

Can I ask then ....

De it really matter what I do at my end if the same is not done inward bound for example if I prioritise certain traffic (x box) will my router give it a priority going out but not coming in?

I think also I'll just manual load balance by routing upstairs traffic down one line and downstairs traffic down the other and then set policies to fail over

Thanks again for your replies. Is there a better way to get the max benefit of a couple of lines so that game traffic and iplayer traffic do not affect each other?

In reply to a post by satattak:

Ok you guys have now got me rethinking.

Can I ask then ....

De it really matter what I do at my end if the same is not done inward bound for example if I prioritise certain traffic (x box) will my router give it a priority going out but not coming in?

Yes it does. Prioritizing outgoing traffic will affect incoming traffic due to the syn-ack handshake

I think also I'll just manual load balance by routing upstairs traffic down one line and downstairs traffic down the other and then set policies to fail over

that's an easy way but not as good as proper per-packet load balancing

Thanks again for your replies. Is there a better way to get the max benefit of a couple of lines so that game traffic and iplayer traffic do not affect each other?

You could use QOS to achieve this, or FQ-codel

In reply to a post by satattak:

I think also I'll just manual load balance by routing upstairs traffic down one line and downstairs traffic down the other and then set policies to fail over

That seems a very odd thing to do, as it would in effect mean paying for two lines but in logical terms only using one, for a fractional if any gain in performance.

Given that the two lines will also almost certainly have (possibly considerable) different performances in each direction, with one line being better than the other in both respects, it doesn't seem a good idea to me.

From your example description I would simply have two lines. One for streaming and one for gaming, with separate routers. Which is which can be easily altered once both are in use.

Which ISP are you with? Have you ever considered Plusnet, who operate precisely the prioritisation system you want, in both directions, at line and internal network levels? So it all happens on your single line.

The only thing wrong with Plusnet is a very bad Customer Service Help System. If you don't need help and don't have serious problems it is very good value for money. If you have a serious problem it can be a pig until you get past Tier 1 support. The Community Forum is often the best place to get things resolved.

I think you may have misread. I don't believe he is saying that he is going to use one line for upstream traffic and one for down. Rather - he is going to split his traffic from the first level of his house in to one line and downstairs (xbox) in to another which is what you go on to suggest

I do this currently - I have two 8Mbps ADSL lines. Traffic from netflix and general browsing is routed down one (mostly nextflix) and more latency sensitive traffic (xbox, voip etc) is routed down another.

Edited by deleted (Thu 02-Feb-17 08:09:31)

In reply to a post by huwwatkins:

I think you may have misread. I don't believe he is saying that he is going to use one line for upstream traffic and one for down. Rather - he is going to split his traffic from the first level of his house in to one line and downstairs (xbox) in to another which is what you go on to suggest

Oops! How right you are .

To be honest I did see the "upstairs/downstairs" but decided a word auto-complete had gone wrong and not been noticed. Completely missing the obvious .

you could use a netduma, i do.

I run two lines and do a downstairs/upstairs split and if I want to flip it, just switch one Ethernet cable around upstairs.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Which ISP are you with? Have you ever considered Plusnet, who operate precisely the prioritisation system you want, in both directions, at line and internal network levels? So it all happens on your single line.

Plusnet can only really do downstream, it's up to you to do any upstream.

More generally I think splitting upstairs/downstairs is the path of least resistance. Balancing tcp connections with two different public IPs will confuse some websites and of course per packet is impossible.

Being with Plusnet I don't know how bad downstream latency is hurt by downloading on a 20/80 line. Anyone ever test this? On ADSL 512, 2meg, and 6meg BTW I could get 500- 600ms on each, which implies that BTW sized buffers according to connection rate. With bufferbloat being a "thing" now, I wonder whether they are a lot smaller for FTTC. You would also need to hit an 80meg line a lot harder = many TCPs to measure.

I could imagine a 20/80 line being OK without QOS if all that's happening is someone streaming and someone gaming.

While doing your own upstream QOS can affect downloads, you can't practically limit downstream by upstream QOS. The "affect downloads" bit of doing upstream QOS is to allow downloads to still max the line in the presence of upstream traffic, which if you have a slow upstream with a huge buffer will be limited by the acks getting held up/lost. On 20/80 possibly less of an issue, the ECI OR modem I have has a pfifo which at 20 meg sync is quite small - of course at 2meg sync it would be 10x more bloated assuming the same size.

In reply to a post by legume:

Plusnet can only really do downstream, it's up to you to do any upstream.

It operates over their whole network including user upstream being forwarded to the wider internet. I agree they cannot affect the users' lines, but it can and does affect what happens within Plusnet's internal network and onward links, and in passing user-requested data through to the WBC network that feeds the DSLAM.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 02-Feb-17 13:51:06)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by legume:

Plusnet can only really do downstream, it's up to you to do any upstream.

It operates over their whole network including user upstream being forwarded to the wider internet. I agree they cannot affect the users' lines, but it can and does affect what happens within Plusnet's internal network and onward links, and in passing user-requested data through to the WBC network that feeds the DSLAM.

OK, I have never read anywhere that says they mark upstream on their ingress - but of course you may have a link that does.

I always assumed they wouldn't really need to, given the asymmetry of user lines vs largely symmetrical internal/peering links - it being too late to affect BTW links. Saying that you may be correct and it could be useful to them if things go wrong kit wise and they end up having to mitigate by putting far more traffic over some link than is normal.

I posted as your first post read like changing to Plusnet would "sort" QOS for you in both directions - as you know and accept it won't = you have to sort your own upstream whatever Plusnet do with it once it gets to them.

In reply to a post by satattak:

Hi I want to load balance across 2 FTTC lines I have the draytek vigor 2060 which will allow me to connect the 1st vdsl line directly and the second wan port via the providers broadband router. The vigor will then allow balancing across the vdsl and wan port.

I will need a second line installing for the second vdsl connection (Ive had two phone lines in the past)

Question is if I had two phone lines in the past is that two separate copper to the cabinet? or to they share the one copper to make two lines?

Will I get 2 x 70 meg into the router 70meg being my download that I can get on average

If the cabinet fails I lose my internet but if there is a problem at the exchange with one of my providers I presumably will be ok if I use two different LLU providers?

Has anyone else adopted this approach ?

Thanks in advance

I used to do this in my old house. One Plusnet line, one Talktalk line, both 80/20 profile.

I used the TT modem/router and a BTOR modem with an Asus router on the PN line.

Both were set as different subnets, they were interconnected by ethernet. DHCP was on the PN router and subnet, the TT one was only used on my server and my main desktop, which each had two NICs and two connections to the switch, and then used software to do the load balancing (Connectify Dispatch).

Other devices, e.g. TV, FireTV, VoIP, just used the PN FTTC connection via a DHCP assigned address, but my server and my desktop would use both on anything that was multi sourced.

HTTPS connections are sticky this way and actually work properly. Some sites and apps were wonky where I'd change IP each page refresh, but thanks to using a software solution I could set that app to one connection only.

I did try a Draytek Vigor 2960 to do the load balancing, but it was aimed at businesses balancing lots of connections from different PCs and was doing silly things like routing everything from my server (running bittorrent and newsgroups) over one connection and not using the other.

I also tried setting up my Asus router (RT ac-87u) with dual wan, but had similar issues.

The software way was best I found, as it meant everything multithreaded worked well.

Somewhat ironically after discussing Plusnet QOS, it seems to have gone AWOL on my line.

I can only lag myself out downloading by 65ms (65 meg sync), but that's more than it used to be.

tcpdump is showing tos 0x0 for pings and BO3 on xboxes - they used to be marked 0xa0. I wonder if it's a new network thing - I changed over end of November and haven't looked till now. We wouldn't have noticed as we usually game together and no one would be doing huge downloads at the same time.