Load balancing a 4g and a standard line - anyone?

Just wondering who out there has a standard FTTC connection and decided to compliment it with a 4G connection?

I moved from a 350+ Virgin Media connection to a property where this wasn't possible so purchased a Three sim, Huawei B612S and a Ponyting directional antenna. I found this worked quite well for a few weeks giving me ~80mb down and 30ish up. The ping's aren't the best and when the line is saturated I find it sometimes just falls over all together.

I decided to just get a cheap FTTC connection from plusnet as it was the cheapest possible all in at about £17 a month for a guaranteed minimum of 30.9mb but I should expect 35ish.

Today the plusnet went live and it's more like 24mb which I've spoken to their support about but I'm seeing pretty nice speed test results of 120ish down and about 40 up which seems to tie in with the speeds I expected and it means the 4G connection doesn't need to be saturated the whole time.

I've set it so that the FTTC connection gets pretty much 100% priority for my office use but if I'm not using the office computer the rest is effectively load balanced.

I've put the smart home stuff on the FTTC connection as it seems to generate a lot of random traffic that likes to be handled quickly so thought it'd be nice to dump it over that.

I'm going to be away from home for a week so wont get to abuse the connection too much but since 8AM i've been very impressed with how responsive everything in the house is.

Huawei B612 4G -----> Asus AC87U <------- plusenet home hub

After the load balancing rules everything then goes out to a Orbi + 4 satelite setup to cover the larger house on their own switch.

Wired stuff sits on a cisco unmanaged switch and the final piece of the network is a pi-hole.

I have to say that this load balanced connection works FAR FAR FAR better than when I had the virgin media connection and tried load balancing it to a 4g connection. Even setting the ratios the 4G just seemed to make it fall over every hour or so and somethimes everything would just fail.

I think that this works well because the lines are closer in speeds.

So, any of you doing similar?

I haven't got around to doing this however I am wanting to do the following. This will give me the ability to have two connections and get the best deals from Virgin / BT by rotating. Mine's mostly for fun as I don't actually need resilience - just like to mess about with things.

1) Virgin Media 200mb connection (via Superhub modem mode)
2) Smarty 4G 30mb connection (Mikrotik 4g LTE device)
3) Possibly 30mb connection via FTTC (using a modem such as Huawei or Draytek)

Feed two WAN connections in to a suitable router and load balancing. I am thinking possibly a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter - however looking on Youtube they look very difficult to setup, so open to ideas if anyone has any?

Link the system to BT Wholehome or similar to provide WiFi, and a separate switch to support lan outlets. Potentially i'd want ability to setup VLANs.

One thing I am conscious about is i don't want to end up with massively power hungry equipment. I was put off the Netgear Orbi's when I saw their power consumption was more than twice that of the BT Wholehome.

Edited by gary333 (Mon 19-Aug-19 16:17:12)

I didnt look at power consumption of the orbis but in the middle of the night when it's just the networking stuff, the server and the fridges/freezers/alarm stuff left on I'm drawing 200w which isn't too bad.

Load balancing across three services becomes more tricky tech wise as lots of the entry level stuff simply wont support more than 2 WANs. The Asus AC87U seems quite happy to play with two connections but there is no option for a third connection.

You may find that "just playing" gets annoying as when I tried that with my 350mb virgin connection and the 4G it just annoyed the hell out of me!