 Hi there, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. So I've been making a few videos over the past few weeks in this whole subject of home networking and internet connectivity and backup internet and failover internet and all these exciting topics and Something that I've been struggling to understand or was struggling to understand until about yesterday Was why is bonding so hard to achieve for consumers and with the help of the excellent home networking subreddit and the very very knowledgeable home networking Boffins as we'd say in Ireland and Britain aficionados is I think the probably best American equivalent with the help of the home networking Boffins I've been able to figure out or I've been able to understand why bonding is so difficult and in a home network environment So I'm just going to like explain What I've learned in this video in case you're also kind of kind of having a hard time figuring it out So bonding the first time I came across the word bonding was I was taking a train about six weeks ago In the US between New York. I think it was Penn Station I'm not sure that was one of the one of the railway stations in New York and rural Connecticut now As commonly happens when you're on a train these days. There is a free Wi-Fi internet service So I'm on the free Wi-Fi internet. I'm doing my browsing responding to some emails and The internet goes in and goes out as frequently happens when you're on a bus or a train and using internet and you're Transversing less populated territory. So the internet's like in and out. So I decided I'll go on I'll just use my cellular data. So I go on to cellular and the same thing happens I'm getting like 4g then it's going to 3g then it's going to 2 bars 4 bars So when I came back I asked a question on the wonderful website called Reddit and I said There has to be something That can take one connection the train Wi-Fi. Let's say I can take the second connection Let's say my cellular data and can kind of fuse them together So that they're both running into the same pipe and in the instance that Cellular doesn't work. Well, I can pull from Wi-Fi and if Wi-Fi goes down I can pull from cellular and perhaps even I can combine the two speeds to increase the speed of my overall connection. They said yes bonding when I said bonding So all mentions of bonding on the internet Lead back to speedify this company called speedify and I was uh interested in speedify But I kind of put this out of my mind till I came back for my trip when I came back for my trip Our internet was down for two days and I was like Gotta sort this out. Maybe I need to do bonding So, uh, this was the start of my home internet rabbit hole as I call it and it's led me to look at a few different technologies For home internet connectivity failover load balancing and bonding Now I can explain failover pretty easily because I have it set up now my home network failover is like what I'm doing I have my isp Router which I have to keep because it's vds l2. It's this really Old-fashioned connection. We're still using in Israel. So I'm using it just as a modem in fact That goes into a router which has cellular connectivity on us And the router knows to only use that if the isp line goes down It's failover So there's failover running on the cellular router and then I've got an access point bringing Wi-Fi around the house So everything on the home network from this computer on wired to all the wireless devices now have backup connectivity So that in the event that the isp goes down as it tends to do Cellular kicks in it is slower, but at least it's there and then the isp comes back So that's failover pretty easy to pretty easy to do pretty easy to understand load balancing is um slightly different now there's a whole explanation on Uh, the internet that you can find i'm looking at uh, kemp technologies here their website load balancing algorithms and techniques I know if you use linux and use network manager, you'll come across these When you're trying to set up bonding or teaming there. So it talks about the various ones round robin Least connection weighted connection Now the thing is this load balancing is better known in server lands So when you're talking about setting up infrastructure in the cloud Load balancers will take incoming traffic and distribute that intelligently among a pool of servers Um, they're less used. I think amongst the consumer home networking world would be fair to say But the idea is kind of similar. They're basically multi-wan routers. So instead of having just a modem Well, maybe after modem, but instead of having just one wide area network connection They have a few and what that means is that you can put in a few internet pulling devices So you're let's say you have two isps and maybe a cellular modem and maybe a satellite connection So with the load balancing router you can pull in These multiple connections and then load balance across your local area network Now the load balancing is not the same thing as bonding and it took me a while to kind of get exactly what the differences were So bonding is what I call the sort of pipe dream of uh people frustrated with their internet on a train people living in uh Places with poor Connectivity like a lot of guys interested in uh bonding internet would be living in uh the out the outback of the of australia or uh cruise ships actually use bonding because when you're out at sea Uh, you might have a few different satellite connections, but they're each kind of weak So uh cruise ships commonly use bonding to to get better connectivity for people on board. So But beyond these kind of marginal use cases Load balancing is the kind of more common business one. So basically that might be uh taking your IP based load balancing. So let's say on your local area network you have um An ip printer or you have an ip webcam You could say okay Those guys are going to be getting from internet from one one one one being my dsl connection and i'm going to keep my My best connection my t my t1 or my broadband connection for This pool of uh of uh of ip of local ip's Now there's different types of uh of load balancing and you can watch videos on the draytech writers and they'll show you What types of load balancing they can facilitate, but You can tell it's not the same thing as bonding. It's not saying let's always take all the wan sources plugged into this thing and let's mush them into some kind of a super super internet trunk and everybody's all the time going to get faster internet Not the same thing as load balancing now What i was struggling to understand was why why can we do load balancing? Why can we do failover? But when you look for bonded internet writers You're you're already getting into what i was finding, you know enterprise level hardware selling for multiple thousands of dollars So why isn't there a consumer bonding hardware because if there is that's exactly what i'd like now My failover was just the entry point to the to the uh to the next networking things and the reason there is a very specific reason for that now it's basically uh this and uh this is that the Sorry i'm just trying to get my my images up here on the next on the next screen You bonding's a two way street if you think about when your internet comes into your house typically typically just from your isp So it's pretty straightforward you Have the isp here your home network here And everything when you pulling in traffic comes in through the router pulling and you're sending sending packets to the internet It goes out through the router router and there's nothing It's just a regular routing process When you add multiple ones that becomes more complicated And if you want to do this as bonding You need from what i understand in most cases Perhaps all cases you need it to be dual sided You need to pull in all your different sources Then on your local area network you can you can aggregate that connectivity and put that around your LAN But then your traffic has to go back to the internet and when it goes back to the internet That's where you need a second piece of hardware that's going to Take the request for the internet Pull them apart and then send them to the isps But that has to be done in the cloud By a second piece of hardware after you've already so basically it's kind of sd1 if you're if you've come across that concept So if you take a look at speedify once i created this thread on reddit The wonderful world of reddit everything became clear to me. This was the thread i started as i've shown and um This then explains exactly why if you take the open mptcp router which i was also looking at So i thought oh this sounds like a great solution to my to my what i'm looking to do i'll just buy a i'll buy a piece of hardware a mini pc i'll put this uh this this this uh Operating system on it and i'll get i'll connect all my wands and my devices and everything will be beautiful No, there's a vps in this schematic and the reason there's a vps is because you need that vps to do bonding To debond and send your connections back to the different isps This schematic is from speedify and it just explains why i also couldn't understand why is speedify It didn't make sense to me that it was running on the on the edge on the network edge on your devices um And it didn't make sense to me that it was like this vpn as well and after learning about this it all became clear to me So You have your apps they're running speedify You are taking your various connections your ethernet your lte your wi-fi and then you're sending those connections up to a server That's bonding them and then you're pulling from that on the download and then when that's going back to the internet It's doing that same process. So open mptc is just kind of a freer open source implementation of the um Of the st1 concept for bonded internet This is the best there were many fantastic answers on the reddit thread i started but this this one struck me as the clearest So this is from a reddit user called spotta bonding isn't one sided thing The two ports have to be bonded on both sides of the connection So you can bond both ones if they aren't Bonded on the isp side as well to give to give more context a set of bonded ports Have the same ip address But the connection from two different isps have different up addresses So a returning packet would have no idea which route to take that makes that makes sense If you still want a router that can bond then he goes on to say ubiquity So basically, uh, there is such thing as a bonding hardware on the market But it's not just plug-and-play You can't just take your two isps and your cellular internet and say here you go magic magic piece of hardware Put it all together for me. It's more complicated than that um, and it involves something else sitting up in the cloud that's going to be doing this sort of Uh separation process and telling the packets Which of your various ones to go to so I hope that was clear. I've just learned about this I find it engrossing and it's explained to me why uh bonding load balancing and failover and bonding are certainly not the same But why it's easier to do stuff like load balancing and failover on a local network as opposed to true bonding so thank you. Thank you very much to Uh spotta and all the people in the home networking subreddit really good subreddit For explaining this so clearly to me and if you're interested in bonding as well Maybe this video was useful. If you'd like to get more videos about technology linux home networking All manner of uh geekery like this feel free to hit the subscribe button