Set it and forget it--- Multi wan load balancing/failover wired router

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faster7

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 21, 2000
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What commercial, reasonably priced, boxes have you had luck with for a multi wan wired router? Have a user that has say a 60mbit fixed wireless link and a 20mbit dsl link. Main issue right now is neither one have great uptime, so they are manually jumping their devices over to different wifi network as their method to switch ISP's.

Most of the boxes I've used in the past are either $$$$$$ or discontinued. (Cisco RV042/RV320, sonicwall subscription based stuff, Watchguard trash....)

Sounds like 80% of usage will be streaming, 20% regular internet usage, I suspect the option to add a VPN service could come up at some point depending on how the streaming providers start to handle them being at 2 locations.

Should we try a tplink ER7206 or what else is out there? JUST found their cheaper ER605, cheap enough I can grab it to hammer on but would like to have better reviews first.

This time next year I hope to be able to suggest /support / set users up with openwrt on a certain other vendors repurposed big time overkill hardware, but I haven't got it in place yet at my own house to test it further.

Thanks!
 
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Any Fortigate will do multiwan out of the box balanced in whatever manner you choose. The bandwidth you listed above could handled by any of them. I'm using a 101F here load balancing two 1Gb fiber connections equally with an LTE backup.
 
Could look at the Ubiquiti Edge routers X or 4. I have an Edgerouter X but haven't spent much time with it yet. Appears to have a simple GUI but I'm not familiar yet with how their dual lan failover stuff works. pfSense can do this also. Their netgate devices I hear are nice but pricey. Could get a sff/nuc from the sale/trade section for cheap and have a nice router. It can be set it and forget it but would still need basic configuration.
 
If it was my home, or even family where I'd be supporting it, it'd be openwrt or pfsense on a sff pc. good stuff! I was on pfsense at home from ~2005 until ~2015 or so.

Need something that others can more easily support, if it's not me in a few months. I like Ubiquiti stuff for wireless but ... kind of luke warm on them for routing.

Nicklebon... that Fortigate piece is.... $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ ;)
 
faster7 said:
Nicklebon... that Fortigate piece is.... $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ ;)
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New they can certainly get pricey. That said, they can be picked up used for next to nothing on ebay, craigslist or fb marketplace. For the bandwidth you listed a 30 or 40e or better would do the trick. The basic fw function needs no lic and as stated above will do multiwan load balancing with no lic. They are stupid easy to admin basic features.
 
I've been running multi-wan for better part of 2 decades now at different sites across the US. My experience is with the rv016, rv042, and watchguard products.

We've been using watchguard for several years now. Even their older units that you can get for like $50 shipped used will have a basic nat firewall, ipsec vpn tunnel capability, and multi-wan right out of the box. And even with up to 3 isp accounts, ours has never even broke a sweat on either cpu or memory with uptimes of nearly a year.

Compared to fortigate, juniper, palo alto, et al, the interface seems a bit simpler for me to understand, but let's get one thing straight--when you graduate to enterprise level equipment it's not 'linksys simple' level of administration. These are all very power boxes with a tremendous amount of features and each manufacturer has their own way of organizing the concepts and how to configure everything. I've also looked into zyxel and netgear and this still applies to their higher end smb products--the complexity is there.

That being said, once you go multi-wan with enterprise equipment, you never want to go back. It's dead reliable, failovers are so fast and seamless that many times you don't even realize you lost a wan, and the hardware is so cheap that you'd be hard pressed to find better bang for buck.

As far as those tplink offerings, the er605 is a lot of bang for the buck and does multi-wan fairly decently from what I've read. I've been tempted to try it out myself, but kinda hard to change what 'just works'.

Feel free to ask me any questions.
 
Nicklebon said:
New they can certainly get pricey. That said, they can be picked up used for next to nothing on ebay, craigslist or fb marketplace. For the bandwidth you listed a 30 or 40e or better would do the trick. The basic fw function needs no lic and as stated above will do multiwan load balancing with no lic. They are stupid easy to admin basic features.
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30e and 50e free for shipping from Japan (about $11 usd):
https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...-fortigates-new-noctua-fans-epyc-7351p.34033/
 
How many ports? Nearly any Mikrotik (heck the hex vanilla and up) will do it
 
Burner27 said:
Arista(formerly Untangle) can do what you want for $150/year.
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At 3 sites that would be almost a grand. Not worth it since that's how much a flight costs in the event I have no contact to a site and have to fly out there.

Whoops! Wrong thread and topic. :dead:

That's killer expensive for multi-wan. Even though the OP called watchguard trash, our M200 and M300s handle multi-wan so well we don't even know when a connection is having issues. And it's there by default so even the older boxes have it.
 
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SamirD said:
I forgot about these as they've been priced right since day one--do they require app-based management or can you use a web browser?
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The TP-Link ER605 is an Omada SDN device, so you can run it standalone or with a controller. You've got 3 options for a controller. You can buy their hardware controller for a couple hundred bucks, run their free Java-based software controller on a computer, or use a cloud controller. I run the software controller on an i3-10100 Linux box I'm using mostly as a file server. If you don't use a controller you can just point a browser at the device & use the built-in web interface. The ER605 also has an ssh CLI. Not using a controller costs you features on some devices. Not sure about the routers, but for example the WiFi access points need one for fast roaming. You can also turn off the cloud features entirely.
 
zandor said:
The TP-Link ER605 is an Omada SDN device, so you can run it standalone or with a controller. You've got 3 options for a controller. You can buy their hardware controller for a couple hundred bucks, run their free Java-based software controller on a computer, or use a cloud controller. I run the software controller on an i3-10100 Linux box I'm using mostly as a file server. If you don't use a controller you can just point a browser at the device & use the built-in web interface. The ER605 also has an ssh CLI. Not using a controller costs you features on some devices. Not sure about the routers, but for example the WiFi access points need one for fast roaming. You can also turn off the cloud features entirely.
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Nice! Thank you for the details!
 
For dead simple failover, I have had great luck with Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro and SE. Not a ton of customization, but it is very reliable and quick to manage the failover seamlessly.

Have been running at a few sites and my home for over 2yrs.
 
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