What is a Load Balancer? How does it work?

[nishantt6969]

I have two fiber connections(jio fiber and airtel fiber), I want to combine the bandwidth or if you say I want to do somewhat like if any of the ISP is having an outage, the machine switches to another ISP without even me noticing it. Is there a way to do that?

 

[Sushubh]

buy a dual wan router. they have option for both load balancing and fallback. load balance is where both connections are available and load is shared based on your setting. some routers let you set a percentage. like 80% of requests would go to one wan and rest to the second one and so on. fallback is where you set a primary connection which is used. and if it goes down, router switches to second connection.

openwrt might be able to make any router a dual wan router. i am using it on ERX and have excitel and airtel set in fallback mode. but airtel remains online and my pi uses it over excitel. basically you can put individual devices to different wans following guides online. budget router firmware might not provide such complex capability.

 

[vishalrao]

I bought a TP-Link r605 device a few days ago off Amazon for 7k but have yet to open the box and play around with it...

I have bsnl ftth and airtel 4g router and if things work out I will get an ftth connection from Microscan.

I want to try load balance the two ftth connection and have 4g as backup.

Will try to post updates when I can.

 

[nishantt6969]

buy a dual wan router

any suggestions?

 

[Sushubh]

r605 seems like a good budget choice. but from my experience and the reviews on Amazon listing... failover switch is slow on TP-Link firmware. so you would definitely notice downtime while it switches from primary isp to backup.

Asus and probably other companies have wireless routers which costs a bit more that have dual wan functionality so a single device would work for both load balancing and wireless.

i am pretty happy with erx but it is too old now and does not support duplex gigabit. i think you went through some other threads where some Mikrotik models were recommended by varkey. they are supposedly very good but can be complex to configure.

if you want something simple, r605 seems like a pretty decent choice. their ui is easy to understand based on my experience from one of their older device which lacked gigabit ports.

 

[Sushubh]

some variants of a6/c6 also support openwrt. but storage is low so you might face some storage related issues in longer run. plus setting it with dual wan config would require some work. but this would get you a dual wan wireless router for around 2500 with gigabit ports.

 

[vishalrao]

The TP-Link r605 apparently has weighted load balance, so instead of using failover option you can set the weight ratio to something huge like 20000:20000:1 where the first 2 are the ftth and the third is the 4g link..
At least that's what I will also try out in addition to regular failover.

 

[shashankb]

Can suggest Mikrotik. Built to perform over looks(UI).Very cost-effective and gives a great performance. Configuration guides are available. Should not be too much of an issue
You can also run cool dashboards like this

https://grafana.com/api/dashboards/10950/images/6938/image

 

[AftabIN]

Dual wan router is a intresting thing but correct me if I'm wrong, I think it is not relevant now a days for most of the home consumers where maximum users are not more than 10 at a particular time, and in fiber broadband era where cheapest plans and router are enough to open 100 of webpages simultaneously. And also it doesn't help in increasing download speed if we download from a single server except torrent. Also jio and airtel are very good in terms of uptime.

 

[Sushubh]

it is a good option for people who keep a backup connection. this way you can use both the connections at the same time.