Hello,

I have read about some routers that claim they can do Broadband Bonding / WAN Virtualization like this one: http://blog.mushroomnetworks.com/2012/0 ... net-lines/

Can some one tell us if RouterOS can do such function and if so, how?

Thanks
AlfaGulf

If you are talking about using more than one ISP, yes you can.
The most used solution is PCC http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/PCC

No Toni,

A Broadband Bonding allows a single TCP connection to take advantage of the sum of the two or more WAN speeds.
For example , if I have to ISPs with 3Mbps each, then I could do a single session FTP file transfer with 6Mbps transfer rate.

Note that Broadband Bonding is done without ISP cooperation or knowledge.

Yes, PPC does something similar for upstream traffic. What MT does not offer is "Truffle or Broadband Bonding Service" which gives higher throughput to single session. (it does cost you extra and most likely you pay per Gb)

You could emulate BBS on MT with multilink PPP, but I'n not sure how reliable it is.

No Toni,

A Broadband Bonding allows a single TCP connection to take advantage of the sum of the two or more WAN speeds.
For example , if I have to ISPs with 3Mbps each, then I could do a single session FTP file transfer with 6Mbps transfer rate.

Note that Broadband Bonding is done without ISP cooperation or knowledge.

And how would you establish a connection with a server form at least two different IPs making him think it is coming from
one alone? Really curios how could this be achieved.

You are absolutely right Toni, I apologies.

After reading more about the Mushroom Networks product, I noticed the need for so called "Broadband Bonding Service monthly subscription".
Although they mention it is optional, I can't see how would it work without such cooperation from a third party.

But if this is how it is done, then I could imagine making two VPN tunnels (one on each ISP) to my Amazon EC2 server and have RouterOS bond them as one trunk.
Of coarse, I have to Pay Amazon for the Bandwidth and other computing resources!

Is that doable?

Thanks
AlfaGulf

You can do bonding as long as it supported on both sites (you and Amazon).
As for VPN, there is some talk around the forum about some malfunctions of the RouterOS VPN.
Personally, I don't have that much experience either with VPN or bonding. That little VPN I have done,
has gone well so far.

I've done this using eoip tunnels. In my exp there was about 10-15% bandwidth lost while doing it but I found more value in using PCC (not to mention the costs for the remote end were higher than additional connections at the primary site). Sure it doesn't help the single stream but in the end that really didn't matter for the network in my case.

if it's not for a network/business and for soho use you're better off using host based software to do this. I used one a while back but i forget what it was sorry

Use PCC - one (TCP, UDP) connection will occupy one of each loadbalanced WAN link.

If you want one connection to go up to the combined bandwidth - you can do tests with having a RouterBOARD on the other end of the WAN links as well and do "bonding" of tunnels.

If you have jitter - bonding is not a good option - PCC loadbalancing would be better.

Some WAN links do have consistency between them in their jitterness - like multiple E1/T1s - bonding those may have decent results.

Avoid headaches and use native Ethernet over fiber-optic wavelength - should pay for itself in time.