Question about bridging/load balancing two fios connections

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computerpro3

LightningRod
Joined
Mar 29, 2003
Messages
8,702
Hi,

I have a couple of quick questions regarding bridging two fios connections.

In my new place (which will be wired up with an overkill of Cat6 to each room, among other things) a 50/10 fios connection is $99 a month, while a 30/10 is $59. There is no option for higher upload speeds unless you go with 100/20 which is a ridiculous $300 a month. I saw someone in the "post your bandwidth thread" who had two 30/10 fiber connections and he was bridging them to achieve speeds of 60/20.

Upload speed is extremely important to me as I'm trying to backup two terrabytes of data to crashplan, so if it's possible to get two of the 30/10's and bridge them that's what I'd like to do.

I've done some preliminary research and know that I need a dual WAN router. What I'm not sure of is exactly how it works.

Are the two connections simply load balanced, so on a single connection like a FTP for example I won't really get 60/20? Or are the connections actually combined so that I would be able to utilize a true 60/20 pipe regardless of what I'm downloading or uploading? If the former is the case, how common is this - do most things utilize multiple connections so I would be able to get 60/20 (like crashplan, for example)?

Also, how difficult would this be to set up? I understand that I won't be able to do this with a consumer router, but I have very little linux experience and I've never played around with managed firewalls/switches/etc. I'd be willing to learn something like pfsense (always good to expand your knowledge), but I'm just wondering what I'm in for.
 
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You won't get a true 60/20 from load balancing- what you'll get is 2x 30/10. What you want is typically called bonding- where you take two separate lines and combine them to double the speeds. This is usually done on DSL/ISDN where the physical transport medium simply does not have the capacity for higher speeds. Load-balancing is most useful when you have many users or connections and want to spread them over multiple connections for improved speed and/or failover. In your specific case, you may be able to upload to CrashPlan at 10Mb AND FTP at 10Mb. I say 'may' because most load-balancing is round-robin, where every other connection goes to a different WAN than the one before it. You can set rules, however, to have certain traffic stick to a WAN- CrashPlan on one, FTP on the other.
Load-balancing is fairly easy with pfSense, especially the 2.0 release. One pitfall you may run into is needing separate WAN gateways on each load-balanced connection. You probably have the same gateway assigned to both FiOS 'modems', so the way around it would be to have at least one in router mode so it assigns a different gateway.
If high upload speed is essential, you'll have to go with the more expensive package. If higher aggregate speed is what you want, load-balancing will work. The fail-over aspect won't be of much use in your case, except if one 'modem' goes out.
 
Connections would be load balanced but to the world would appear as 2 different public IPs. Thereby a single TCP/UDP session would only be able to come from one of these, making your max upload per session equal to the max upload of one FiOS connection. If the backup software used multiple connections, then any load balancing should automagically distribute these across your WANs.

A few other things... what zip code are you in? The FiOS plans you have available doesn't match up with Verizon's standard offerings.
Residential: 15/5, 25/25, 50/20, 150/35
Business: 15/5, 25/25, 35/35, 50/20, 150/35
(http://www22.verizon.com/Residential/FiOSInternet/Plans/Plans.htm, http://smallbusiness.verizon.com/products/internet/fios/plans.aspx#plans)

Obviously if you could get even 25/25 (which for me is 69.99), that would be a faster upload and cheaper then two x/10's.

Also, FiOS plans usually have some "fluff". I started with the 15/5 plan and never found a reason to upgrade to anything faster as with the "fluff" I sustain 30/20 speeds 24x7. Now this could change at anytime, but its been the same since I first signed up 2 years ago.

I don't want to tell you not to run a dual WAN set-up if you're dead set on it, but just make sure the extra cost is worth it.
 
Where do you live? Those are some strange Verizon FiOS teirs, usually it's something around 15/5>25/25>35/35>150/65.

The only way you can truely bond two residential Internet connections to act as one is to have a VPN box in a datacenter somewhere that splits its' fast pipe into two split VPN tunnels that you merge at your house.

Fail-over and load-balancing would be achievable with a dual-WAN router much more easily though.
 
Thanks guys, I've got some thinking to do.

I'm in zipcode 45208 and I used fios as a slang term - should haven said fiber as it will be provided through Cincinnati Bell's Fioptics service.

I'm really annoyed at them because when they first rolled it out in my area I had a simultaneous 30/30 connection for $39 per month. Now they drop the upload by 2/3 and jack up the price.

How come upload is always so slow on service provides? Time Warner is even worse. Is the only reason literally because consumers don't demand it higher, so they cap it as low as possible?
 
Upload is slow so they can oversell the download. Also, most consumer applications are download heavy.
You might want to look at their business offerings but they typically offer the same stuff for double the price and claim they'll fix yours first.
 
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