Way to bond multiple modems?

Networking Networking Hardware
1

so, the mighty has fallen, 

ive moved away form 200 megabits per second down,

to the middle of nowhere under the land of fallout's dead las vegas desert.

 

my current only and last hope for internet is one home grown company that uses the old doccis 2.0

and thus can only send me one data channel to bond per modem

im sadly now paying $50 per 10Mb/s

where as i WAS paying about that for the 200Mb/s (le sigh)

 

at any rate, my households current solution is to have multiple modems,  (2x for now)

$100 = 2x 10Mb modems  

 

is there any way that we could Hulk Smash those 2 incoming lines into a box or something and then out a switch at an aggregated 20Mb/s?

2

This appears to be a duplicate post.  You should remove this one.

3

its a post in software as well as hardware.

as i am open to solutions based in ether.

some people knowledgeable in the topic may frequent the hardware forum and not the software one,

and vice versa.

4

http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/?model=TL-R470T%2B

Get a home load-balancing router. Profit? :)

5

cool, is that like a plug n play thing?
i just plug in the ethernets from all of my modems into that and it load balances automagiccalllyyy?

6

ok ive looked into a few of those units, and i think my choices are between 2




OR

does anyone have any experence with ether?
with the tp, from what i understand, you could bond up to like 4 modems but it has a max speed of 350megabit

and the linksys one, says you can bond up to 2 modems, but i never found a max throughput rating, it claimed 800 megabit on one page, but if i dont have multiple sources i wont take it into account

Barnacules Nerdgasm
took a more basic model of the tp and reviewed it
TL-R470T+ V2

id like the best one, and since there almost $200 id like to get the one that is most futureproof,
when internet speeds could actually be a gigabit
maybe @wendell could chime in and give some advice ?
one suggestion was to build a pfsence box, but im not sure if its for fail-over or load-balancing like these boxes

1 Like
7

None of the consumer grade routers touch on gigabit speeds. All the GB speeds that are advertised concern the switch module on the device, meaning the LAN traffic. WAN traffic, on the other hand is considerably less, like 100-200 Mbits.

In order to get 2GB router throughput (WAN), you'd have to shell a lot more than 200$. More like 5k :)

8

Only if you were looking for a hardware all-in-one solution.

You could build a PFSense box and have it load balance your WAN traffic.
It can handle as many GB ports as you can fit on whatever motherboard you choose to use.

OR you just get a couple of these.


https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN

3 Likes
9

brilliant, that works as well,
now that also means i need to look into pfsence
uhh,
what do you guys think would work best ?
like a whole new little mini itx system ?
if i wanna cheap out for now,i could grab one of those network boxes, and build my happy nerd lair part by part lateer

considering the FASTEST net in the area currently is 1 Megabyte/s we really dont need to get crazy YET

although, after we take the output and plug it into a switch, that switch can be gigabit, and thus keep our lan transfers happy (i do enjoy me my steam game streaming to a busted ass old laptop)

we sadly do not have any old random computers laying about,
so whatever we choose, it will have to be a custom build solution.
since this will have to take the place of a router, itll have to be an always-on thing

were going to have 4 possibly 5 computer users in the home, possibly split into three ish room, each with video game consoles and computers, and everyone with possibly at some point a laptop and cellphones.
id prefer to maintain a local network speed of at least gigabit, for file sharing and game steaming and whatnot,

back at my old place before we moved each modem supported and pulled nearly 200 megabits down,
so if that level of service is ever upgraded in this area, ((needles ca))
then id like a system that could handle 2x 200 meg connections
(or god forbit we get lucky or something and even faster net rolls in.
there is a fiber backbone somewhere near us in town or so says the rumor, but the cable dude, said that the bandwidth would still cost nearly $50 a meg.)
although at least for a year we wont have to worry about that.

of course id WANT ten gig for all the things bwuahaha
but i dont shit bricks of gold, so thats just a pipedream
somehow setup a like 2gb ramcache or something for massive local data transfers, sigh. oh dreams

with the pfsence, we can set it up so that it caches all downloads ?
i have that idea, because we ALL use steam, and with our super shit internet, it would be great to download, say skyrim
on my pc,
and if someone ELSE in the house sees how cool it is and decides to buy it, then their steam would download from the copy on the pfsence ? at gigabt speed?

10

@DeusQain Yeah, that's also a solution, but in order to achieve 2 gigabit throughtput, you'd have to get a decent CPU, because in a PFSense box all routing is done in the software, as opposed to hardware in the networking appliances. So, you'd have to shell at least 400-500$ for a computer and more for the NICs. Plus, you'd have to do some reading and educating, because PF is not point and click :)

I wouldn't personally build gigabit router now, as there is no use for those speeds yet.

I'd go with one of those 180-200$ SOHO routers and be done with it. A few years down the road I would revisit the idea, if need arises.

11

Actually, PFSense IS just point and click.. it's just more complicated point and click.

Also, You don't really need a fast CPU, routing isn't that CPU intensive.
You also have to remember that Multi-Wan isn't the same as Ethernet Bonding (LAG)

This is the CPU/GigE chip in THIS router. It's only 600mhz and it's 32bit.

I have this running at my office. It's what we call ULTIMATE Overkill.


I will run out of network horsepower before my CPU gets eaten.

Now that being said. If you invest in a decent NIC like THIS: it offloads a ton of stuff and frees up CPU cycles.

If you are looking to do VPN type stuff, you can find some VPN Accelerator cards and offload the encryption work to that.

12

@DeusQain I'm pretty aware of the PC-router concept. The 600MHz CPU that you point out is used for VPN, NAT and other CPU related tasks. The hardware routing and switching is done in the ASICs within the NIC modules.

You screenshots show 16 cores worth of Opteron power, btw ^^

For him, to achieve 2Gbps, he'd need a decent CPU, as per pfsense recommendation:

CPU Selection

The numbers stated in the following sections can be increased slightly for quality NICs, and decreased (possibly substantially) with low quality NICs. All of the following numbers also assume no packages are installed.

10-20 Mbps
We recommend a modern (less than 4 year old) Intel or AMD CPU clocked at at least 500MHz.
21-100 Mbps
We recommend a modern 1.0 GHz Intel or AMD CPU
101-500 Mbps
Server class hardware with PCI-e network adapters, or newer desktop hardware with PCI-e network adapters. No less than a modern Intel or AMD CPU clocked at 2.0 GHz.
501+ Mbps
Server class hardware with PCI-e network adapters. Multiple cores at > 2.0GHz are required.

And that goes waaay beyond a typical budget of a few hundred dollars.

NIC teaming/bonding/ether-channel has nothing to do with routing performance, as it's done in the NICs hardware and doesn't use CPU cycles.

That's not to say it can't be done, it's just not practical for home use, unless you get the money and need to do that.

As for the point and click nature of pfsense, yes, it is a web based menu, if only you know the terminology behind the networking stuff ;)

13

hell dude a $99 dollar amd quad core i can slap a hyrer 212 evo on for $30 will clock at 4.4 ghz easy
and then all i need is a mobo with 3x pci slots for 3x of those 4x 1gbe ports on it, a 4tb hdd and like 8gb ram for caching and stuff ?
and i never meant doubling up on gigabit internet,
i meant like if our area ever hit the speeds of my last house wich would be multiples of 200 megabit
so like 400-600 megabit down max
but in the far far future it would be nice to know that i COULD get that nasty white-band area 51 global dominance router that passes all traffic in the world through it capacity

at ANY point, since im ALREADY willing to drop $200 on a load balancing router - then its not too far off in the world of ideas that i might toss a couple hundred more into the idea and then be set for life

14

that HP NC364T PCIe 4Pt Gigabit Server Adptr


that you linked me the first time,
would that also do the

https://store.pfsense.org/2PortGigEAdapter/ that that one you linked does?

im thinking like an amd fx 4100 or the closest thing that i can find with an 8gb kit

im just taking a shot in the dark here but let me think
4 desktops
one networked stereo reciever
3 maybe MAYBE 4 video game consoles. But those can be on wifi.
and at minimum 2x line ins for internet. max of 3 id say, i dont ever see myself spending enough for more than 2x lines, but you never know

so thats like 8 ish plugs that id need in wich case i could get 2x of those 4x gbe network cards and be ok

i am interested in the caching, since my net is so slow, if i download a game, id like the file to be saved on the pfsence box, in case i delete it , or a roommate also buys and downloads that same game, it will come off of a locally stored copy , instead of using all our bandwidth for hours on end

15

Yes, I know the screen shots show 16 cores of Opteron, that's a server chassis. (it's overkill and pretty)

That CPU I linked does everything but the internal (LAN) switching. It's the central point in the "SoHo" routers switch.

It IS the ASIC that you speak of, it's a 600Mhz routing chip, with extensions for interpreting the WiFi Radio, and a switch for integration into the secondary switch chip that controls the GigE LAN ports.

That being said, when you get a 100$ Dual port NIC that's designed for the ent environment in a decent "modern" system and that offloads all the "Switching" concerns.
If you want to do a lot of VPN stuff, there are VPN Accelerator cards you can get that offload all the encryption from the CPU.
The hardware requirement list on the PFSense website hasn't changed much in ages. While Hardware has made significant improvements.

on a 1:1 scale, the ASICs will destroy the GCPU on the switching and routing front.

As for practical for your home. I see no reason why NOT to set up a low power 4/6/8 core system with 8 or 16GB ram, and a 128GB SSD, slap in a really nice NIC and you are ready for almost anything.

As for pushing 2Gbps, I would really like to do some test cases on this.

I have that Dual Quad-Core CPU system I could run some tests on.

16

The Quad is literally the first thing I found on Google. There are many different brands and designs, but I am aware that many folk don't know they exist. The second one is from the PFSense site.

As for your internal network, I always suggest getting a dedicated switch, As @Darkrage correctly pointed out, dedicated switching hardware is much faster than General purpose CPUs attempting to do "switching."

17

when you guys say just goahead and get a

do you guys mean just go spend the $200 on the

18

you guys have got me all confused now, sigh
so what, build the pfsence pc, but only use it with the 2 input internet ports, and one output ethernet,
out TO a gigabit switch box ? which will then connect all my other bullshit?

internet1 + internet2 > pfsencebox > 10 port gigabit switch > all my computers and shit ?
or
internet1 + internet2 > pfsencebox with 2x 4gbe network cards > all my computers and shit ?
or

internet1 + internet2 > to the $200 load balance router > switch > all my junk

19

I would go the

route.. But I also like doing things the hard way.
I also like the functionality of a PFSense box.

20

ok then,
in wich case,
lets kick off the next phase
lets build a pc!
the amd fx 4100 was just a random idea,
but lets pick out some stuff.
can i get suggestions from the audience ?