4G and FTTC Connection sharing

My home connection only has BT FTTC with a a maximum speed of 20 down and 0.8 up, but an EE 4G connection can get about 60 down and 30 up.

I plan on buying a microtik router with an EE sim but I still wanted to use the FTTC line as we still use the landline.

I have a PFsense router and I planned to merge the connections and I was wondering if there was a way I could set it up for certain sites/services e.g. Netflix to use the 4G connection and gaming connections to use the FTTC where the latency will be lower or for something like a torrent client to use both at the same time, or if I were able to set certain that are on the same LAN to use 4G and others to use FTTC.

I tried to merge the connections when I did a previous test with a huawei 5186s with a 3 4G connection but some websites did not work properly with two ip addresses and I found the overall connection was lowered due to there being a mismatch in speeds.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

A true merge is called bonding and needs kit at both ends, and can be expensive

Best you are likely to achieve is load balancing and possible by specific routing tables to steer some services via one of the connections, but that will mean fiddling around a fair bit with pfsense

Thanks for the reply

I had looked at bonding but it seemed too expensive and if I was doing it with fixed lines it would be slower than a single 4G connection, my FTTC download is usable but the upload is horrendous and really bottlenecks the connection.

I did try load balancing but it seemed to be slower than using 4G on its own and some websites did not work properly, unless I configured it incorrectly.

I'll have a look at routing tables as this might be what I missed the first time

I would use just 4G on its own but it seems like a waste not using the FTTC connection for anything other than failover

You could go for the "simple" solution. When you are gaming connect to the FTTC and when you want speed connect to the 4G. Switch between them as needed according to the prevalent task at hand. Trying to route the traffic for specific services through specific connections is likely to be labour intensive and need constant tweaking.

The crude but simple have ethernet cable to gaming devices and switch according to whether gaming or streaming is what I'd plump for.

Used to be one to spend hours configuring stuff to do what I want, but now prefer the not so pretty but can get more done solutions.

I used to have an ADSL + 4G connection setup with pfsense where I'd send online banking traffic down the ADSL connection and all other traffic would go whichever way it liked.

I achieved this by using firewall rules with two rules per bank, first one is an allow and the second is a deny. The allow rule had the ADSL(typo) gateway and the deny rule had the 4G gateway.

(doh... wrote them the wrong way around first time...)

Edited by victoria1214 (Fri 22-May-20 10:35:37)

Indeed "Occam's razor" is often the way to go............

Makes life so much easier