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Load balancing router recommendation?

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dmolavi

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For reasons not important here, I have both Xfinity and FiOS connetions active at my house. (The FiOS will be the only permanent one, Xfinity goes away in 10 months).

I have an ASUS AX88U but found that it's load balancing is less than reliable with it's dual WAN functionality. Obviously, I can't do channel bonding because the ISPs are different.

What are some reliable, reasonably priced, load balancing routers that I can put at the edge of my network to handle load balancing? I'm network (and CLI) savvy, so no worries there. I've seen rec's for and against the EdgeRouter 4 (older, but reliable)...

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance...
 
How big are the internet pipes? There are very few multi-gig routers around. Do you want load balancing or failover?

If you are accessing banks they will not allow you to flip flop on a secure connection. You need to be able to add rules and stuff to make this happen. These kinds of rules will impact performance with hardware acceleration.

The Cisco RV340 router can do this without too much impact using ACLs but the RV340 is only a 1 gig router.
 
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Xfinity is 200/5 (blech), FiOS is 200/200.

Load balancing would be ideal. I may try using the 'routing rules' in Asus to have specific devices use a specific WAN, but I'm not sure how well that will work.
 
I would guess ASUS is not up to the task of load balancing maybe failover. Cisco also has loading balancing based on bandwidth so if the internet pipes don't match the router will compensate.
 
I would guess ASUS is not up to the task of load balancing maybe failover. Cisco also has loading balancing based on bandwidth so if the internet pipes don't match the router will compensate.
which Cisco routers can do this, which are appropriate for home use (don't need some enterprise level beast)?
 
The Cisco RV340, RV345, and RV345P. The RV340 would be the cheapest. IS it worth it for 10 months? It would be cheaper and easier to up 1 of your internet pipes to 1 gig. For what you would pay for a router you could buy a gig service and still have money left over. I have added the router emulator for the RV340 router. Look at the load balancing.

https://www.cisco.com/assets/sol/sb...mulator_v1-0-03-15/index.html#/GettingStarted
 
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i'm not looking at this for the added throughput - just so that i'm not wasting money on the Xfinity connection. I'm paying for it (long story) so i might as well use it.

I suppose i could just put the Xfinity modem upstairs and run a separate network up there...
 
Most any wired firewall solution will have multi-WAN capability. In the same class as Cisco RV there is also Draytek Vigor to consider. On the cheaper end there's UI EdgeRouter or Mikrotik RB/CCR. For turn-key and rock-solid there's Peplink, although they're probably more costly than you're looking for. With your level of skill, you may want to think about a community firewall distro (pfSense, OpenWRT, Untangle, etc.) on a DIY x86 box, be it an embedded appliance like a Qotom or Lanner, or an SFF PC with a multi-NIC Intel card in it -- that would give you practically all the throughput you need, all in-software, so no hardware-acceleration to have to worry about breaking.
 
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Most any wired firewall solution will have multi-WAN capability. In the same class as Cisco RV there is also Draytek Vigor to consider. On the cheaper end there's UI EdgeRouter or Mikrotik RB/CCR. For turn-key and rock-solid there's Peplink, although they're probably more costly than you're looking for. With your level of skill, you may want to think about a community firewall distro (pfSense, OpenWRT, Untangle, etc.) on a DIY x86 box, be it an embedded appliance like a Qotom or Lanner, or an SFF PC with a multi-NIC Intel card in it -- that would give you practically all the throughput you need, all in-software, so no hardware-acceleration to have to worry about breaking.

Some of those routers will be rated based on hardware-acceleration so look hard before you buy. And don't do well when you break it. Routers should really support ACLs without just killing the performance.
 
I wonder what the latency would be like on a Qotom or Lanner PC running Untangle? I would like to run Untangle as a transparent bridge behind my Cisco router. But I hate latency. I am afraid the lag would bug me. I did this years ago when I had my server rack and I ran Untangle on a Xeon server motherboard and it was great. Is anybody doing this?
 

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