Bandwidth aggregation ADSL and Satellite broadband

For various reasons I have both a BT ADSL2 connection (approx 5/0.7Mbps) and a Tooway satellite connection (approx 19/5Mbps). Both are "unlimited".

If I were to connect both connections to a dual WAN multi-homing router, such as the Edimax BR-6524k, would I get the low latency benefits of the ADSL2, with the speed benefits of the Tooway - or is this just wishful thinking?

This is more a hypothetical question. At the moment I use the BT connection for web browsing etc, and switch to the Tooway for big file transfers. So just curious about what would happen if I were to aggregate the two links although in reality I'm unllikely to spend out on the hardware.

With two separate WAN connections, the best that can be done is policy routing with failover.

You designate your main WAN connection, to which outbound traffic is sent by default. If this connection is down, traffic is sent to the other WAN connection - that's the failover bit. In addition, you can set a series of policies, which are rules that direct certain traffic to particular connections. For example, you could have a policy directing traffic on a certain TCP port used by a game to the ADSL connection for lower latency.


You could use both connections as tunnels to some sort of aggregation service, but you will not be able to take advantage of the different qualities of the two connections that way.

true aggregation would be problematic with two paths with massive latency differences, so protocol based routing would make more sense - http on the ADSL and FTP / SMTP / POP3 on the satellite perhaps

Thanks for the replies. You've confirmed what I suspected - that mixing adsl and satellite data isn't a good idea. I'll continue to do as I do now, using two separate wireless networks and switching between the two as and when required. Until fibre comes my way