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Professional Discussions => Routing and Switching => Topic started by: Ho3ein on December 31, 2022, 07:25:33 AM

Title: Aggregate connection of three modems together
Post by: Ho3ein on December 31, 2022, 07:25:33 AM
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/894943012898091028/1058692636669644882/Screenshot_2022-12-31_135442.png)
Hi
I wanted to know if there is such a device that if two modems are disconnected, the connection between the home computer and the game server will not be interrupted, and when I connect the previous two modems and disconnect the third one, the connection between the home computer and the game will not be interrupted.
It is possible ?

And if I connect all three modems directly to the home pc, is there a program that can do the same thing?
Title: Re: Aggregate connection of three modems together
Post by: deanwebb on December 31, 2022, 05:41:01 PM
You're looking for a link balancer. They are not cheap. But, basically, everything connects to the link balancer which then has the hardware in it to dynamically select the best path from those available for sending out the traffic. I don't know of any software that does that, as it would have to ride on non-specialized hardware for that function.
Title: Re: Aggregate connection of three modems together
Post by: Dieselboy on January 02, 2023, 09:58:31 PM
OpenWRT: An open-source router firmware can do this: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wan/multiwan/mwan3

For it to work, you need to use the openWRT as your "gateway" and the openWRT will then pick an internet modem to use.
You might be able to do this with decent consumer routers also like ASUS, I used to have an ASUS and there is an asus openWRT firmware, too. So you can get current hardware on openwrt and keep all functionality: https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/

Check these posts out for the experience:
1. https://forum.openwrt.org/t/two-wan-ports-and-load-balancing/88598
2. https://forum.openwrt.org/t/openwrt-21-02-mwan3-load-balancing-not-working-and-connectivity-lags/100366

Depending on what your doing over the internet will depend on your experience. For example, if you're within an online-hosted game and your main internet line goes down, the router will fail over to the other connection and your game may still hang until you reconnect / relogin because your source WAN IP has changed. In other cases, you may not even realise your internet is down.

Though, it's getting rarer these days for internet connections to fail frequently, with more connections using fibre to the home or VDSL for fibre to the curb/node.

Back in the ADSL days, you can request a slightly slower but much more stable profile from the ISP. The ISP will usually try and force the fastest most unstable connection they can, so to give you the fastest 10.5mb download speed and it might disconnect and retrain every 24 hours. But if you request the 8mb/s profile then it could be stable and up for months at a time.

So if your internet is so unstable that you are considering purchasing 3x internet services, from different ISPs to try and achieve some satisfactory level of reliability then if it were me, I'd be looking at just one connection and trying to understand why it's unstable.
Title: Re: Aggregate connection of three modems together
Post by: deanwebb on January 05, 2023, 08:17:39 AM
If one is a professional gamer, then the need for redundant WAN links is pertinent to one's job duties. :)