TL-R480T+ V2 - how to configure usage of multiple WANs properly
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Hi
I have a question about the load balancer and how to set it up to do what I want it to do.
I'm using this in a home environment which during lockdown means 4 or 5 people on zoom calls or teams at once.
I live in a rural area where the only half decent connections available are 4g wireless. I can get something like 4-5Mbps download and 6-8Mbps upload from each of Three, 02 and Vodafone. All 3 SIMs are in Huawei B311s which are connected to the WAN ports. They are all about the same in terms of speed, but they are all also a bit flakey, so no reason to choose one over the other as 'Primary' and another as 'secondary' or whatever. Not looking to use this setup for failover so much as looking for it to make the most of what is available.
The LAN port is connected to a Tenda MW6 mesh WIFI which works very well.
Overall we seem to just about have enough WAN bandwidth across the 3 WANs for everyone to do what they need to do, but the issue seems to be at times when one of the WANs goes a bit flakey and instead of doing its normal 5Mb it drops to say 0.5Mb... So still working, just very slow.
So if you are on a call on Zoom, or watching Netflix say and this happens, my understanding is the application you are using 'sticks' with the WAN it's on unless it becomes totally unavailable. So you could be the only person in the house online, and just because the Load Balancer decided to put Netflix through WAN2 you could be sat there with a slow 0.5Mb connection over WAN2 when WAN1 or WAN3 could deliver 5Mb for you each and no-one else is even using those WANs.
Is there a way to configure the device to make better use of the available bandwidth across all 3 connections, so if one is running a bit slower it switches your zoom call or Netflix or whatever over onto the best WAN? Or continually spreads the routes the packets take across all 3?
Thanks
Bushy
I suspect the problem you are facing (netflix video dropping to 0.5 mbps) may be due to the traffic going through the other WAN of the selected netflix server. Please refer to the below diagram for a better understanding.
Most of the video streaming providers hosts their cache servers at the edge of the internet. Its a joint effort between the ISPs and the video steaming companies. The netflix (YT, FB also) will try to choose the server nearest to the content consumer based on the IP address from the where the request came from. There is a possibility that when you smart TV requested for a video, the request was sent through ISP1 and netflix selected the ISP1 cache server to serve the video. but when the smart TV makes the connection with ISP1's NF video server, the multi WAN router may route the request through ISP 2. If the ISP1 & ISP2 do not have local peering or have bad routing between them (going through international gateways) , you may experience poor download speeds and hence poor video quality.
So the solution is the make the Multi-WAN Router to route the traffic to the cache/CDN servers through the respective ISP WAN by configuring static routes. The procedure for identifying the cache server is as below. (in brief)
For each ISP,
1. Enable DNS Logging
2. Access fast.com
3. From DNS logs find the URLs like .oca.nflxvideo.net
4. Identify the local servers from the URLs
5. Find the IP and configure the static route.
Let me know if you are interested, I will post the detailed procedure for the same. (including YT, FB, AKAMAI)
If you find this too complex, you can configure the router to route the smart TV's traffic through a specific WAN using the policy routing option.