I just wanted to share a recent success i’ve had combining 3x mediocre/rubbish internet connections into 1 reasonably good connection. And gather feedback/suggestions. But mainly I wanted to give a shout out to MPTCPRouter - it’s an amazing project!
With this kind of set up it’s possilble to quickly add an arbitrary number of additional connections.
ISP connections
I have 3 available, and their (very) rough have up/down speeds are as follows - in Mbps
BT (ADSL) - up: 7, down: 30
Vodafone (4G) - up: 30, down: 180
Smarty mobile (phone hotspot/4G) - up: 15, down: 40
Once combined, I get roughly 50 up and 220 down - clearly not a simple addition of the 3, but better than any one.
Latency is up a bit, but not much. Unloaded it’s ~30ms (up from 15ms on BT only)
Attached is a sketch of the layout
Credits:
- This project uses the seemingly amazing OpenMPTCPRouter from @Ysurac. Kudos - this is a really neat project
- Guides/videos from OneMarcFifty. Very useful intro and practical guides.
Lessons:
A few things I picked up on the way.
- I tried using MCTCPRouter on both a RPi4 and an old WRT3200ACM. I don’t know why by I was having endless issues with the RPi disconecting from the WANs all the time. And the WRT similarly kept loosing connections - I think the firmware from ysurac is still a wip - but I also think the device lacks the grunt.
- A proxmox vm, with disk image import worked immediately - and it’s possible to tune it to ‘right size’ the cpu/ram.
- I think i’m maxing out the routing capacity of my LAN router. It’s a Unifi USG and with any kind of IDS/IDP enabled the throughput is right down. And connecting directly to the MPTCPRouter i get much better speeds (I love an excuse for an upgrade)
Next steps: - and things i could do with ideas on.
- Tuning the size of the VPC - atm it’s a very basic machine, and i’ve not really looked at it under load to see if it’s got enough overhead
- Tuning MPTCP settings to try to get to closer to sum of connection speeds, and accommodate variability in 4G connections
- Upgrading my router
- Adding more connections! Perhaps I can convince my partner to let me piggy back off their phone…