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Imagine you only have DSL with 5mbps Down and 2mbps Up.

Is it possible to have 10 of these for example and combine them in a way that would increase the upstrean bandwidth to one server?

In my head it works like this:

  • intranet with one gateway/router
  • router connected to multi wan load ballancer
  • on each ballancer wan port router with vpn clinet set up, tunneling to a server
  • ?some? software on the server in cloud joining all these connection into one interface again

Sketch of multiwan connection

I would need this mostly for big uploads to a server, downlink to the office is not that important at all.
Does it even make sense? I drew an image to clarify.

2 Answers 2

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You can accomplish load sharing, but not true load balancing. No individual flow could be faster than the speed of the fastest individual link. It can be a win if there are a lot of users, for example, but won't be much help in the case you cite (transferring a large file).

That said - you'd be far better served just getting a faster circuit. Unequal cost load balancing is notoriously hard to accomplish, there's a lot of complexity in monitoring / managing / maintaining multiple VPN tunnels and the amount of effort sunk into it likely would far surpass the point of diminishing returns.

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  • Is there any way to make uploads faster if I can't get better ISP, but only multiple below average connections?
    – nana
    Oct 30, 2012 at 15:18
  • If a given upload were broken up into pieces -and- whatever was balancing traffic among the links was able to do so perfectly then you'd be able to upload faster. In practice the load balancing mechanisms out there are statistically effective but generally carry no guarantee that a particular small set of flows will be balanced. All of the above also presupposes mechanisms to get return traffic back to you efficiently as well. Overall there are good reasons why this approach has never caught on...
    – rnxrx
    Oct 30, 2012 at 23:35
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Peplink products would do this for you in a fairly PnP way.

http://www.peplink.com/balance/tech-spec/

Alternatively, if you have gear at each end that can do GRE tunneling and OSPF or EIGRP, you could hack it together using multiple tunnels and load balancing. See here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094820.shtml

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  • I was looking a t PepLink products, especially for the multiwan load balancer. Unfortunately I don't have "gear" per se, I can have multiple VPS servers but probably no hardware.
    – nana
    Oct 30, 2012 at 15:19

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