Question about RT-AC3200, dual WAN and loadbalancing

[Maude]

Hi,

I just got my 3200 and I'm quite happy with it. I know that there is a dual WAN feature and that it can be used in load balancing.

Does this means that if I were to get another modem and another subscription to my ISP (current 60/10) for another 60/10 and another modem, putting this one on LAN 1 and load balancing I could theoretically achieve 120/20 ?

Thanks !

Maude

 

[Maude]

Come on !
Is this question as stupid as I think it is ???

 

[Steve Horbachuk]

short answer, no. a single client will not achieve 120/20. However you would be able to theoretically 120/20 concurrently on 2 clients

 

[Maude]

OK, so if I have TWO modems from my ISP at 60/10 each and connect them in loadbalancing that MIGHT work eh ?

 

[Steve Horbachuk]

no, if you were to connect 2x modems in load balancing mode you would still get 60/10 on a speed test.

 

[Maude]

OK, got it...

Thanks !

Maude

 

[ManuCH]

Actually, I noticed that speedtest.net opens several concurrent connections. That way, I've seen the bandwidths of my 2 WAN connections being added up - sometimes, not always.

But as Steve said, you will usually achieve more bandwidth only if you do several different things from your client, or from several clients. One single download will always only go through 1 connection.

 

[Nocturnal]

Today I re-enabled Dual WAN for the first time in over a year on my RT68. I have the latest Merlin firmware. When I tried dual WAN in the past it was completely unusable. The router would think the primary WAN was down (it was not) and do a failover. Then failback again. This was very disruptive. In the past Merlin did not touch the dual WAN code so we depended on ASUS fixing this. Hopefully this has been addressed by ASUS. I use the failover Dual WAN type because my cable is much much faster than DSL which I will only use in emergencies.

Load balancing is much trickier to do properly than failover. Even if speedtest gives you the appearance of high download speeds that will just be for bragging rights. It won't help necessarily with large downloads as these typically use a single connection which will use 1 WAN only. If you have several heavy users on your router you can perhaps see benefits. Say you combine two slow connections and you have 3 or 4 concurrent Netflix streams going. Hopefully these will be spread over the two WAN links.

Still, it seems ASUS Dual WAN is a bit problematic. For real failover and bonding a proper router may be needed. I used a Cisco RV42 but it had only 100 Mb ethernet. My cable tops out around 200 Mb/s these days so I need GbE to connect my modem. That is why I went back to trying the RT68. I see the dreaded "WAN(0) Connection: ISP's DHCP did not function properly." messages in my log but the router appears to stay connected so perhaps this is harmless now. I hope so.

 

[Maude]

Well, thanks for those last two very good explanations...

 

[geekmaster]

... It won't help necessarily with large downloads as these typically use a single connection which will use 1 WAN only. ...

A download accelerator will break a download up into multiple segments, so they can come from different WANs. Some download accelerators can even download segments from alternate servers, if a web page contains multiple mirror downloads...