Aggregating bandwidth of 4 fiber connections?

[tolgahan]

Hi,

I have FTTH in my home but it is only limited to 100 down and 8 up for some reason. However, I can buy multiple subscriptions from my ISP and they all channeled through the same single fiber cable.

This is basically what I have in my room right now;

To this ONT device, 1 fiber cable goes to the green port and 4 ethernet cables comes out of the 4 yellow RJ45 ports. Each of these cables basically have 100/8 fiber connections.

Now I can plug any of these 4 cables into my router and I have access to internet.

However, I want to somehow combine these 4 and have a total of 400/32 down/up speed at the end. I assume with a physical device such as TP-Link TL-R605 or a Mikrotik device?

Please note that I know how to do load balancing but I don’t want that. I want to aggregate bandwidths of these 4 into a total of 400/32.

Also, as far as I know, doing so will have me multi-connection setup and single-connection supported websites, apps etc will still only work with one of the 4 connections so I suppose I need to have a VPN as well at the front in this setup in order to have a single-connection setup all the time.

So far I’ve found out about the devices I mentioned above but I’m not sure if using those would be the ultimate solution or not. Or maybe is there an ONT modem that can already do this and output it from one of it’s LAN ports?

What would be the most effective solution for this while having a clean setup?

 

[L&LD]

The ISP is the only one that can aggregate different connections.

While you may get a total of 400/32Mbps, each client can only saturate a single port.

When you plug into the different ports, do you get different external IP's? I'm guessing no.

 

[tolgahan]

The ISP is the only one that can aggregate different connections.

While you may get a total of 400/32Mbps, each client can only saturate a single port.

When you plug into the different ports, do you get different external IP's? I'm guessing no.

Each output from LAN ports have their own static IPs because basically each of these 4 ports contain a separate internet plan from my ISP. Technically they each could’ve been from different ISPs as well but I went with the same ISP to keep things simple.

 

[L&LD]

Then this makes it more likely that only the ISP can provide a true 'aggregate' solution.

Probably better to cancel the 4x plan and just get a single IP with a larger capacity.

 

[tolgahan]

Probably better to cancel the 4x plan and just get a single IP with a larger capacity.

Unfortunately, that’s not an option. I was hoping I could do bonding somehow with a device like TL-R600 or a Mikrotik and have a VPN upfront to make it a single IP.

 

[L&LD]

I hope someone can guide you through such a setup. I've never seen a bonded connection (even through the ISP) that was stable for any length of time.

I hope things have changed since then, good luck.

 

[Tech9]

However, I want to somehow combine these 4 and have a total of 400/32 down/up speed at the end. I assume with a physical device such as TP-Link TL-R605 or a Mikrotik device?

You can't do that on your end. Load balancing is up to single line speed for most applications. You are looking for trouble in exchange of small benefit in multi-threaded downloads like torrents. Secure sites may complain, web pages may load slower or incomplete. If using VPN, popular services will recognize the servers and may not work. One real benefit is when assigning different devices to different WAN, each limited to single ISP line speed, but with potential higher simultaneous throughput. My family has 4 members and I looked at traffic stats for the last 10 days. No traffic exceeded 80Mbps speeds with normal Internet use. We use YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. like many others, over 1TB traffic per month. Do you really need to pay 2x-4x the ISP price + VPN subscription + extra equipment cost + more trouble?

 

[tolgahan]

You can't do that on your end. Load balancing is up to single line speed for most applications. You are looking for trouble in exchange of small benefit in multi-threaded downloads like torrents. Secure sites may complain, web pages may load slower or incomplete. If using VPN, popular services will recognize the servers and may not work. One real benefit is when assigning different devices to different WAN, each limited to single ISP line speed, but with potential higher simultaneous throughput. My family has 4 members and I looked at traffic stats for the last 10 days. No traffic exceeded 80Mbps speeds with normal Internet use. We use YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. like many others, over 1TB traffic per month. Do you really need to pay 2x-4x the ISP price + VPN subscription + extra equipment cost + more trouble?

It sounds complicated when you put it that way. I hope I’ll find a simple plug-and-play solution otherwise it probably won’t worth the trouble as you said.

 

[Tech9]

I have 3x dual WAN routers in fail over configuration. I did test load balancing and it works in most cases, but not always. Increased throughput benefits are minimal. My routers are more expensive Cisco RV345P model. Home routers offering dual WAN are not as good. Asuswrt implementation is broken, for example. Synology is better, but the router is quite expensive for what it is. I had one TL-R605 as well for tests - 2x WAN fail over is adequate, but I'm not sure about load balancing with 4x WAN. You can buy one and test, of you like. It's a $60 router, but keep in mind some of the features are not available without OC200 controller with Omada SDN software. You can run the software on a PC. More information on TP-Link website, Specifications.

 

[tolgahan]

I have 3x dual WAN routers in fail over configuration. I did test load balancing and it works in most cases, but not always. Increased throughput benefits are minimal. My routers are more expensive Cisco RV345P model. Home routers offering dual WAN are not as good. Asuswrt implementation is broken, for example. Synology is better, but the router is quite expensive for what it is. I had one TL-R605 as well for tests - 2x WAN fail over is adequate, but I'm not sure about load balancing with 4x WAN. You can buy one and test, of you like. It's a $60 router, but keep in mind some of the features are not available without OC200 controller with Omada SDN software. You can run the software on a PC. More information on TP-Link website, Specifications.

I do have a Synology RT2600AC. I’ll try it’s link aggregation feature with dual wan and see how it performs.

 

[Tech9]

I do have a Synology RT2600AC

Yes, this is the one. Get a second ISP line, see how it goes.