Hi all,
Some time ago I bought an Asus RT-AC68U due to it's good wifi and Dual WAN capabilities. The Dual WAN feature which interested me the most was load balancing.
Since then I have found many deficiencies in the load balancing and quirks between firmware releases, such as:
- Older firmwares appear to handle load balancing differently to the newer ones. The old firmwares for example do not allow aggregation of the WAN connections during for example a speed test, whereas the newer ones do. However the newer ones were producing slow loading and sometimes no loading at all of web sites and assets making them near unusable.
- There are sometimes issues with incoming connections via port forwarding such that a device is only available via a particular WAN connection at any one time. The only way I have found around this is to use the Dual WAN routing rules to force a particular device via a particular WAN. The problem with this is that connections from that device will no longer be load balanced.
- Outgoing SSH connections randomly fail to connect unless the destination IP is assigned to a particular WAN with routing rules. Again, this means no load balancing of connections to that IP.
I have recently been looking at the Asus BTR-AC828. I see it's based on a different chipset and a few articles and YouTube videos have shown it aggregating two WAN connections in a different manner to what I am used to with Asus (e.g a speedtest shows the combined result of both WAN connections).
I wonder if anybody knows whether this means that the Dual WAN functionality of the Asus routers is all or partly down to hardware rather than software and I may have better luck with the BTR router?
Many thanks for any comments or advice!
Dave
Some time ago I bought an Asus RT-AC68U due to it's good wifi and Dual WAN capabilities. The Dual WAN feature which interested me the most was load balancing.
Since then I have found many deficiencies in the load balancing and quirks between firmware releases, such as:
- Older firmwares appear to handle load balancing differently to the newer ones. The old firmwares for example do not allow aggregation of the WAN connections during for example a speed test, whereas the newer ones do. However the newer ones were producing slow loading and sometimes no loading at all of web sites and assets making them near unusable.
- There are sometimes issues with incoming connections via port forwarding such that a device is only available via a particular WAN connection at any one time. The only way I have found around this is to use the Dual WAN routing rules to force a particular device via a particular WAN. The problem with this is that connections from that device will no longer be load balanced.
- Outgoing SSH connections randomly fail to connect unless the destination IP is assigned to a particular WAN with routing rules. Again, this means no load balancing of connections to that IP.
I have recently been looking at the Asus BTR-AC828. I see it's based on a different chipset and a few articles and YouTube videos have shown it aggregating two WAN connections in a different manner to what I am used to with Asus (e.g a speedtest shows the combined result of both WAN connections).
I wonder if anybody knows whether this means that the Dual WAN functionality of the Asus routers is all or partly down to hardware rather than software and I may have better luck with the BTR router?
Many thanks for any comments or advice!
Dave
