Bonding DSL Lines?

RouterOS Forwarding Protocols
1

Hi,

Is it possible to bond multiple DSL lines with RouterOS?

Not so much for load balancing but to increase the download & upload speed?

Any help or pointers in the right direction would help.

2

You can only if the opposite side of the dsl will be set for bonding too. Or you can run a tunnel thru each dsl to some router in outer world and set the bonding on the tunnels there. If you have such place in your possession.

3

We have done this and it works. We call this “cheap SDSL”.
2 to 4 ADSL one side, and .. 2 to 4 RouterOS virtual machines hosted in the internet, so we have Mikrotik gear at both ends of the “link” and we can set ip eoip & bonding.
Total bandwidth is really aggregated even with 1 client (like 1 FTP transfer), but there are some problems:

  • Due to the use of stacked tunnels (pptp, eoip, bonding), you loose like 10-20% of the bandwith.
  • If one ADSL fails, well, something the bonding works as it should, sometimes the link becomes veeeery slow.
  • The total bandwith is based on the worst ADSL line. For example if you have 3 lines (4Mbps, 8Mpbs, 8Mbps), then you will have 3 x 4Mbps bandwith (minus the 10-20%). You’d better bond only the two last ADSL to have 2 x 8Mbps.
  • I read people saying in forums etc that bonding with DSL lines suck, due to retries, errors, small failure inherent to DSL technology. I agree with the principe, but in the facts it’s working quite well (as long as all links are up). It might depend on your country and the quality of telephony lines..

Hope it helps

4

Thanks.

As I have a RouterOS/CCR already in the datacentre, I guess it’s simply a case of creating the EOIP tunnels, bonding them at each end and putting an IP on them?

5

Yes.
The trick is to tell the client part to use “ADSL A” for “L2TP/Eoip A” and “ADSL B” for “L2TP/Eoip B”, because the destination IP will be the same.. I had to use multiple IPs at destination to clearly separate traffic, if you can do better i’m interested :slight_smile:

6

I don’t suppose you have a sample config I could look at?

I have been playing for 12 hours now and can’t seem to get my head around it as ADSL seems to complicate things a whole lot more!!

7

Here is a drawing; as said before i had to create 1 Routeros VM per ADSL line in datacenter.
ADSL Bonding.png