Dual Wan throughput

[youpii]

Hello

I noticed that the throughput tests of the dual wan routers are the same as the single wan routers and they peak around 900Mbits/s which is basically gigabit wirespeed.
Shouldn't it be possible to go beyond that limit when enabling load balancing on these routers with multiple clients?

 

[thiggins]

Perhaps, but we don't test it. And you would need two Gigabit ISPs to take advantage of it.

Remember any single client would not benefit from > 1 Gbps throughput due to the way load balancing / aggregation works.

 

[azazel1024]

Also it may NOT be faster. Routing at those speeds takes quite a bit of overhead. You could look at the simultaneous up/down numbers to get a rough guess at the half-duplex dual WAN loadbalanced numbers for a dual WAN router.

If it can do 900Mbps on a single WAN port half duplex and it can handle 1300Mbps on a single WAN port full duplex, my guess would be if you were running both WAN ports load balanced, you could get unidirectional ~1300Mbps between the two WAN ports.

routing at a gigabit a second takes a LOT of processing power. Now try 2Gbps.

To add to what Thiggins was saying, you'll need two Gigabit ISPs. I don't think it is much of a stretch to say that the number of people, even on business connections, who live in an area with two Gigabit ISPs is probably less than 1% of the US population and probably not a lot more of the European or Japanese population. Probably less than a tenth of a percent.

Then there is also having to pay for it. Now granted, I am in a vaguely enviable position where I am, as I have Verizon FIOS and Comcast (maybe not so enviable about the later). If I REALLY wanted, and could afford the ~$700 a month, I could subscribe to both of their top tier services to get 500/500 and 150/15 (I think it is 15Mbps up, maybe it is 25Mbps on their top tier?), as Comcast doesn't provide faster than that in my area (vaguely rural).

Honestly what I'd LOVE is a very cheap 2nd provider, even if the speed was low. Comcasts basic tier is 6/1 (or maybe it is 764Kbps up), but it is also $50 a month for that speed!!! No way am I paying $50 a month for what would effectively be a backup solution for my current FIOS (75/75, as anything faster is a "quantum leap" in pricing and I don't really need it). Even DSL, or heck, a vaguely unmetered 4G connection would be fine. So long as it can provide something >4Mbps down and 1Mbps up and had at least 10GB of data a month and was in the $10-15 per month range.

Which sadly I don't think exists. I am mildly tempted to go 4G for backup, but even then, it would cost >$10 a month and would add ZERO data to my current cell plan. Even if it shared the existing one, but added 1-2GB and was only in the $10-15 range I'd be willing to accept...but nope.

I don't think such a thing as cheap, even slow, internet service exists in the United States. So until I become Mr. Moneybags, it is a single internet connection for me and if it goes down, tough luck (fortunately it very rarely goes down).

 

[youpii]

Perhaps, but we don't test it. And you would need two Gigabit ISPs to take advantage of it.

That would be any combination of two WAN links (even a gigabit + DSL), which is the point of a dual WAN router.

Remember any single client would not benefit from > 1 Gbps throughput due to the way load balancing / aggregation works.

Yes, I did mention multiple clients in my question.
Actually, the limit is that a TCP connection cannot span over two links but a single client can download many things a the same time over multiple TCP connections.

 

[youpii]

Also it may NOT be faster. Routing at those speeds takes quite a bit of overhead. You could look at the simultaneous up/down numbers to get a rough guess at the half-duplex dual WAN loadbalanced numbers for a dual WAN router.

If it can do 900Mbps on a single WAN port half duplex and it can handle 1300Mbps on a single WAN port full duplex, my guess would be if you were running both WAN ports load balanced, you could get unidirectional ~1300Mbps between the two WAN ports.

routing at a gigabit a second takes a LOT of processing power. Now try 2Gbps.

Load balancing might take some overhead too. That's why I'm curious to see actual measurements.

To add to what Thiggins was saying, you'll need two Gigabit ISPs. I don't think it is much of a stretch to say that the number of people, even on business connections, who live in an area with two Gigabit ISPs is probably less than 1% of the US population and probably not a lot more of the European or Japanese population. Probably less than a tenth of a percent.

People with a single gigabit link is probably also less than 1%. Should we limit the tests to DSL speeds?

I don't think such a thing as cheap, even slow, internet service exists in the United States. So until I become Mr. Moneybags, it is a single internet connection for me and if it goes down, tough luck (fortunately it very rarely goes down).

Sorry to hear that Internet is expensive in your country.
I pay around 50$ for FTTH (1G/200M), including HDTV & unlimited phone.

I can add a second link for the same price or pay around 30$ for a no frills FTTH (100M/50M) or DSL (10M/1M in my place, up to 20M/2M for people closer)

 

[azazel1024]

I wish, the two providers in my area start at $50USD per month for either 25/25Mbps or 6/1Mbps service (FttH and Cable respectively).

Load balancing may take some overhead, but I'd suspect it is extremely minor if any. As far as I am aware, routers generally are not constantly evaluating a connection to see if they can transfer it between WAN segments, as that is likely to break the TCP/IP session. So every new connection it has to decide which WAN segment to assign it to, but once it has done that, there should be no overhead until a new TCP/IP or UDP (or other) service needs to connect.

The biggest issue you'll run in to, is that most of the dedicated router boxes just aren't that fast at routing, until you get up in to VERY expensive routers. Most of the inexpensive ones (<$200USD) are focusing on SMB features, like VPN, bandwidth limiting, concurrent sessions, VLANs, etc. Basically looking more at rich features than actual routing performance (though most have pretty good VPN performance). Most seem to run to around 300-400Mbps in terms of routing performance, unless you go >$200USD on a dedicated router.

Most of the wifi routers can handle much closer to a gigabit a second of routing performance (some more with simultaneous up/down), but that is also with only regular WAN DHCP and standard NAT. Get to other types of WAN connections and especially with other options, like lots of firewalling options and the performance drops off a lot.

My comment on people with resonable dual WAN options available, between cost and availability issues, means that the potential user base is so low, it likely doesn't make sense to spend the time and effort to add that to a review if only a handful out of (???) several thousand people reading the review might actually be interested in that segement of a review.

 

[System Error Message]

to properly test dual WAN you need 2 routers at least with the core router being much faster than the tested router and 2 PCs. Even so i havent yet seen a router on smallnetbuilder that has been benchmarked faster than 1.5Gb/s and thats with NAT acceleration. This means that it does not yet saturate a single WAN port yet. A single gigabit ethernet port has 2 Gb/s of bandwidth. Whoever made the windows task manager didnt count on bidirectional traffic. At least you can see the packet rates for each direction. Using standard 1514 byte packets you need 80000 packets to fill a gigabit link one way.

I dont mind benchmarking and stress routers since i do have a router capable of wirespeed routing and i have multiple devices.

 

[azazel1024]

Not really. You have the dual WAN router and hook it up to a computer VIA the WAN ports with dual NICs and enough processing power to saturate the two NICs with data. Rinse and repeat on the LAN side of the router. Just need two different TCP/IP sessions so that both interfaces can be utilized.