Hi Guys,
I am new here, and I need your help and advice. Please let me know if this is possible or not. As you can see from the attached image, I want to be able to use both internet connections as one at all times, not in failover or load balancing.
Thank you.
This is theoretically possible, but with a lot of “ifs” and “provided thats”.
The key is that any remote server in the internet will send its response to any incoming request to the address from which the request has arrived. So if two physical paths are available, the sending side must treat both of them as equal routes to the same destination address and use them in turns for packets to that destination. I.e. you will end up with an even distribution of individual packets, rather than whole connections, among those paths.
So if you are an ISP or a large company with your own AS number and the 200 Mbit/s limit on your two uplinks is a physical one, you can advertise both of them as eligible paths to your subnets, and it depends on the rest of the internet topology (which you have no influence over) whether some remote sources will treat the paths as equal and spread the traffic among them evenly.
If you are an end customer, you have to place another router somewhere to a data center with a symmetric gigabit connection, build two VPN tunnels between your dual-WAN on-site Mikrotik and that other router, and use some per-packet strategy to distribute the load between the two tunnels. The src-nat would be done on that data center router, making any remote server see the requests to come from the public address of that router regardless the physical path they took from your on-site Mikrotik. The positive point here is that traffic from any remote source would be evenly spread across the links in this case.
However even if you set it up the way above, sending packets belonging to the same logical connection (like a TCP session) via multiple different physical paths brings one specific issue - some TCP stacks are not really happy if packets arrive in shuffled order, so you’ll probably end up with some unnecessary retransmissions, causing part of the available bandwidth to be wasted.
The quick answer is no, you need to have the same provider doing this through something called ISP bonding.
If you want 400Mbps throughput pay for it and then a single session could access that speed.
However, what you do have is
a. redundancy, in that if ISPA, fails, you still maintain connectivity with ISPB, if the ISP is the same in both cases, then there is NO redundancy.
b. more throughput available for all users, thus you have more capacity to handle a volume of users or few high volume users, and others will still have some bandwidth available.
Hello Sindy and Anav,
First of all, I would like to thank both of you for taking the time to give me an answer, which is much appreciated.
Sindy,
Okay, after reading your message, it does seem plausible, but there is a lot of work and ifs in there. I thought the Mikrotik router in the middle could do something like packet splitting between the two active links to and from the ISPS and then merge them all together when sent to my local network for consumption.
Anav,
That was my first option when speaking to the local ISP to see if they had or would allow bonding from their side. Unfortunately, they do not offer bonding or have any affordable 400+Mbps packages yet. Their only package was way too expensive, almost 10K USD per month for a DIB 1to1.
I thought it was possible, so I bought the Mikrotik E50UG router and should receive it in a few days.
Thank you again.
Nice purchase!!
You will be happy with it…
It will load balance your two WANS quite well, unless you supply all the fans at wembly stadium with service at the same time, you should be content with performance.
First, a packet cannot be split in terms that its first half would use one link and its second half would use the other one. You can only send whole odd packets via one link and whole even packets via the other one. So you can “split” the flow but not individual packets.
Second, you haven’t reacted in any way to my hints regarding own public addresses and AS number, so I figure you get your public address (or multiple public addresses) from the ISP. If you can get two 200 Mbps “services”, each with its own address, from the same ISP and that ISP is tolerant, you may send (upload) packets with the public address of one of the services via the physical path of the other service, but in the download direction, the packets will always arrive through the pipe matching the address, so you cannot aggregate the throughput for download. If you get each uplink from another ISP, this is totally out of question.
That’s why I have suggested that in addition to the router at your site, you’ll need another router somewhere “in the cloud” that will be the “remote end” of your “traffic splitting” setup - it will merge the upload traffic back together before forwarding it to the actual destination, and split the download one so that your on-site router could merge it.
Unlike @anav, I am not that optimistic regarding the performance of the E50UG - the Test Results table on the product page suggests about 500 Mbit/s total throughput (upload and download together) for “25 ip filter rules” and “512 byte packets”, and you plan 400 Mbit/s in one direction. Given that you’ll need tunnels, although not necessarily encrypted ones, the throughput for the payload traffic may be even lower.
And this why @anav is suggesting load balancing, since that is something you can do with one router and two ISP.
One of the “ifs” be is the 200Mb connections are via PPPoE, because “provided that” your ISP supports MLPPP, that could work to bond.
But complexity only goes up from there for bonding. Like do both internet connection have static IPs, or does internet IP come via DHCP? And if either of the ISP is behind a NAT, your options get even more complex. And WAN connection are unstable or variable speed, or speeds are radically different (which may not be the case here)…bonding gets even more problematic since the Mikrotik’s algos are not that sophisticated in approach.
Again bonding requires two routers. Load balancing connections does not.
Good Morning guys,
Again, thank you for replying and sharing your thoughts with me.
Sindy,
Both internet connections are from the same ISP. The issue is that they do not support bonding or aggregation on their end and do not allow Public IP for these packages. 
I apologise for the mistake regarding the packets. As you have stated, I meant the flow of data.
“That’s why I have suggested that in addition to the router at your site, you’ll need another router somewhere “in the cloud” that will be the “remote end” of your “traffic splitting” setup - it will merge the upload traffic back together before forwarding it to the actual destination, and split the download one so that your on-site router could merge it.”
I would not mind trying to get that to work, but cost-wise, and where would such a router be placed, per say?
Unfortunately, I think the only solution is to wait for future packages from the ISP that will be sufficient and affordable and move on to that.
Anav,
Thank you. I also believe that choosing one of the suggested options should be sufficient for two WANs. The whole point of this is that I have a Plex server setup and want to share access with a few family members who are on the same ISP as me, but then I found out that the ISP does not offer Public IP addresses with these packages.
Amm0,
Thank you for replying; it is much appreciated. I believe it would be better at load balancing than my current Asus router 88u.
Have a pleasant day, guys.
It should be placed in some VPS provider datacenter “netwographically” close to your ISP (as in “the one with shortest ping response time from your on-site router no matter the geography” - most VPS providers publish an IP address in each datacenter that you can use to check this). Price-wise, the lowest offer I could find in my region was $5 monthly; the CHR P1 license costs $45 one-time, but there is a generous trial period for so if you find the outcome unsatisfactory, you simply won’t spend these money.
As you don’t get a public address from your ISP, a CHR in the cloud is also a way to obtain an entry point for remote access to your on-site network.
Out of curiosity, what kind of traffic do you plan to run that 200 Mbit/s would not be sufficient for a single connection?
Hello Sindy,
Thank you for your advice and suggestions. I believe the better option is to wait it out, and hopefully, the ISP will release some new packages.
For your curiosity, I have a vast collection of movies and series from 1080p to 4K configured in a Plex server. I considered sharing them remotely with some family members and close friends. I also required a fast internet connection to download. But after going back and forth to my ISP with the recommendations from all of you, they are not willing to offer any or some of these services that you guys mentioned that require me to have bonding for both connections so I can use it as a single connection.
It might be silly or stupid. But I love media, and I would not mind going through all this to get it to work and learning a few more things along the way. Unfortunately, it does not seem that I can do so with the current ISP, and we have very few here.
Again, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer my few questions. It is much appreciated.
With two 200mb connection there should be no issues to both tsream and download, you may with to separate the two functions between the two WANs, such that you dont impact any attempts at streaming while you are downloading.