Load Balancing

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

I’m posting this as a separate question from my ‘basics’ questions as it’s much more specific.

I bought the RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN specifically to manage load balancing of two (or maybe three) connections to the internet. I have found the load balancing page in the manual:-

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Load_Balancing

However, rather like the general documentation this dives into details without giving me a clue as to how to choose the correct strategy. Reading the detail of each method I can mostly understand what they’re on about but there’s no real help on deciding which to use.

My situation is that I currently have two ADSL connections to the internet, I’m possibly planning to replace one of these with a 3G connection and I may also have WiFi to a hotspot. The ADSL ‘modems’, 3G ‘modem’ etc. don’t really matter here, what the RB2011 will see is two (or three) ethernet WAN connections to the internet.

The maximum speed I am going to get from ADSL or 3G is around 4Mb/s so total throughput might hit the dizzying heights of 10Mb/s, it’s hardly super-fast. Most of the time there is likely to be only one user/computer actively acessing the intermet, sometimes there might be two or three but much of the time there will be just one.

So I need a load balancing strategy that will share a single user’s internet usage between two (or more) WAN connections. I realise some protocols will need to be locked to a single WAN (e.g. HTTPS) but otherwise I want some sort of simple way for packets to be shared across the two WANs. Is this possible? If so which load balancing method will suit me best?

Is there a decent ‘high level’ description of the relative merits of load balancing methods anywhere?

2

Use different values with static routes.
Also with minimal configuration it does work too.

I used to use RB450G with 2 PPPOE connections. SInce they were same speed i set route to same lowest values. I didnt require any special NAT/mangle/firewall settings because routerOS automatically used the best route at a time but also used multiple routes with each packet taking the fastest route available (if route is full than it is not fastest at that moment).

For ethernet based connections it may be more complicated requiring NAT and some other features but by default routerOS does multi WAN quite well so not many configurations are needed.

3

You mean just configure the two (or three) WAN connections and leave it to the router?