There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven when Starlink arrives

Re:There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven... by r0m4n0 on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @11:59AM (#28606419)

Yes, there are actually quite a few. In general this is called "carrier aggregation" although this is a generic term and there are many ways in which this is done. I find it more simple to think of this as an analogy, two (or many) internet links are represented by two lines of people trying to enter a doorway. The router software acts as a coordinator for the lines. One method says, take one person from the Verizon line, one from the ATT line (round robin). Another method says, check how fast people move in the lines and prioritize the line that moves faster. There are other ways, some even take into account the type of traffic that you are performing and prioritize differently, some use the secondary links as backups when the primary actually fail (I suppose this is more failover than carrier aggregation).

I believe for Cradlepoint routers, you need a router that has two modems like the one I mention above. There are other brands though, I believe Peplink makes a mobile router that supports carrier aggregation as well. I worked for a company called VeloCloud that designed an SDWAN router that did a complex version of this for businesses but they don't make a mobile router. They did some cool stuff like Dynamic Multi Path Optimization where at the packet level, they could do some proprietary routing and achieve some pretty amazing improvements with packet loss, jitter, and ISP rate limiting.

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Re:There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven... by bradknowles on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @02:23AM (#28613600)

I’ve looked extensively at Peplink devices. They aren’t exactly crystal clear as to which devices actually support SpeedFusion and which ones don’t. And they have multiple additional features which are not supported on all devices that do actually support the baseline SpeedFusion product.

They’re also not very transparent on how you can buy the bigger devices that have like six or eight interfaces. You can buy a Balance 30 device on Amazon for $1k, but that’s a low-end device for them and only supports two Ethernet interfaces plus one optional USB interface. If you want anything more, you have to go through a licensed dealer, all of whom have “contact us for consulting and pricing” rates.

They’re also limited to 200Mbps on their SpeedFusion Cloud service. If you want more than that, you need to get their custom software image to run it on your own hardware or VM somewhere, or you pay them for a dedicated host in their cloud.

I haven’t looked at any of the other main hardware vendors in the SD-WAN space. I haven’t been able to find out as much information about them.

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Re:There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven... by r0m4n0 on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @09:09AM (#28615866)

Totally agree on lack of transparency, really of all the options right now. I think most of these companies sell in enterprise large quantities so when it comes to consumers they just don’t have a means to provide info, support, etc. When I bought my cradlepoint the software license expired and when I called in, they said someone else owned it. It took a lot of back and forth to figure out how to change ownership and to extend the license. We are definitely operating on the gray area of consumer products.

One consumer product company that provides carrier aggregation that seems interesting is Mofi. I almost went with them but didn’t so I don’t have any info other than what’s in their marketing material but worth some research:

https://mofinetwork.com/product/mofi5500-5gxelte-em7411-dual...

They have quite a few models

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