 Hi there. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. So I wanted to do a video after one month of using Speedify, testing it out on Ubuntu Linux for connection bonding and how that has actually worked out as compared to using a load balancing router. Now I described a few videos this month, how I went on a sort of crazed mission to fix my home internet. So my home internet has been just consistently buggy for not only the past year since we moved into our current department, but all the time I've been in Israel using DSL connectivity. It's been surprisingly bad. So I've just been looking for sort of ways to improve that until fiber optic connectivity comes and we can sort of get really stable connectivity, which will hopefully be happening somewhat soon. But if you don't have that, if you live somewhere rural, if you live somewhere like me where you're just your local ISPs are for whatever reason just not providing very consistent internet connectivity. And you work from home and you really, really need good internet that you can count on. So these are two options. One of them is channel bonding and one of them is load balancing and failovers. Let me just kind of pull up my diagram here. This will just explain, it's going to look a little bit noisy and complicated, but I'm just going to explain quickly the difference between these two setups. So what I did firstly here, one way to to sort out this problem or to try to improve your home internet connectivity is to use by a load balancing rider. Now you can find these described as VPN riders, wired riders as opposed to wireless riders, SMB riders. Now the reason for this is because these things are really used in the business environment, typically or the enterprise environment, especially if you're running something like a data center. So in cloud computing and servers, load balancers are kind of essential infrastructures for distributing incoming connections. But you can also use them in a business environment and you can use them in your home if you have multiple WANs, WANs being wide area network. So multiple connections. So you could have Starlink and cellular or you could have ISP and cellular or you could have two cellular and one ISP. Or you could have two ISPs, one fiber optic line, one coaxial line, one DSL line, there's no rules here. You just need to have some kind of a hardware device with enough WAN ports to support the incoming connections. Now what the load balancer does then is the way I have mine set up is as you can see in the diagram, I have my ISP rider coming into load balancer. And I also bought a cellular rider from TP-Link. And I have that coming in there, too, along with the data sim plan that I purchased. So this was always here on my network and these are the two additions, load balancer, the TP-Link, and there's also a Wi-Fi rider on the end of it. But the crucial piece of this gear is the load balancer here in the middle. I'm just going to give it a bit of color to highlight it. So what this guy does basically, it'll take in those connections. And you can do a few kind of interesting things. One is just failover. That's the most basic thing. Failover means that if the ISP line is good, then we're going to use the ISP line. That's going to be primary. But if we have a failover event, super, super low tech, this is off. Then it's going to flip over to cellular. And the way it does this is the load balancer is going to be pinging at an IP address. You can configure these in my TP-Link load balancing rider. You can do single or dual detection. Single detection just does an IP, dual detection, pings and IP and a DNS. And if that is, if this ping fails, well, OK, so the ISP lines down. So let's go over to cellular and then we're going to keep pinging anyway. And when the pings return that this is back, boom, we're going to go back and we're going to put this guy into hibernation again. So it works nicely. But where I find that it works, this works well if you have a long failover event. So let's say that your ISP line goes down for a few hours. Now, this actually used to happen where we were quite a bit when there was like roadworks going on. I have no idea what happened. I can only assume someone was like chopping into a cable periodically. But we had a few of those style events. And this is great for that kind of a setup, right? It fails over. That will take a little bit of time because for your whatever you're doing, you're browsing the internet. It takes a little bit of time for your applications to detect. Oh, there's a we're going through a different right to the internet. So I've timed that at typically about 20 to 30 seconds. But it works. And to an extent, it's a set it and forget a solution. You just run your your ISP router. This guy here, you really want to set this up ideally as a bridge. A bridge means it's going to basically just be used as a modem. So to bring in the DSL connectivity, ditto for the for the cellular. You want to have these both as bridges ideally. You can play around with the DHCP server and IP ranges. But if they have a bridge setting, it'll simplify life. So that's your that's your goal. Get them into this. And then this is effectively the router. And if you have something like a access point here, which is what I have on my network, TP, this is my network. Basically, I think it's like the archer six as AP. OK, so that's coming. That's actually connected to the load balancer. Just put it like here and then there's a switch. And everything that's after the load balancer is going to be getting the enhanced connectivity for want of a better word, which means that, you know, when one goes down, the second goes, second comes up, whether you're using wired internet, whether you're using wireless internet, everything's going to have everything that comes off the load balancer is going to have that. Let's call it backup internet automatically built in. You don't need to do anything to your wireless or to your internet. They're just going to flip over because the load balancer does all this moving for you. So that's one. As I said, this worked really well when there was. Interruptions that lasted for like an hour where it failed, to be honest, was when there was interruptions when I don't know how you describe these are going to call these jaggedy internet events, jaggedy internet events, meaning that when it's the weekend and suddenly everybody's home from the office and everybody's watching Netflix at the same time. Now, your internet's not down, but it's just kind of. It's very, very weak and it's kind of coming in and then dropping off. I don't know if where you live, you get internet like this, but this is kind of how it is for us a lot of weekends or when there's a public holidays here. So when that was the connectivity situation, I find the load balancer didn't work nerdy as well because the load balancer was confused. There was the internet on the primary line was up. So I wasn't going to do the fail over yet because there was a connection, but on the TP-Link, the options for backup and fail over detection are not that advanced. There's no maybe on the Mickey talk and ubiquity devices. There's more options and open WRT in TP-Link. I don't use a word primitive, but it's basically a ping test. There's no way to say, you know, this is supposed to be a 50 megabit per second line. If we get down to below five, it's not down, but it's as good as down. So can you please bring up the second line? So that, to the best of my knowledge, isn't built into the fail over detection. You can also do load balancing on a load balancing radar naturally. So you can use it for sending, configuring different land devices to use a different one, binding applications to so there's there are more things that you can do than fail over, but I find that when we had those intermittent connectivity internet days, this was not working particularly well. I was still getting more down time than I would like having invested so much time and effort in this amazing internet system. So what I started doing was I said, OK, let's give Speedify a second chance. Now, what I'm doing with Speedify is things that already have these two routers in place, my home network. I decided I'm going to just give these a go again on my computer, bonding them. So I picked up a ethernet to USB adapter, stuck that into the computer, ran another wire from the cellular router into the computer. There's already one coming off the ethernet. So now I've got instead of doing the load balancing like the rest of the network, I'm bringing them both into my computer and I'm running Speedify on the computer and I'm actually bonding the connections there. Now, bonding is again, there's more there's more than meets the eye with bonding. It's not just about great. I have two connections or three connections that's just like match them together and like speed everything up. Not that easy. You have to have hardware and the one outside of your local network, that's going to take your pipe, split apart the packets and write them off to the different connection sources. So that's what Speedify basically does. And that's what my diagram I stuck a clad there. So those are really the two configurations you can do in your network. Here are my observations. I like very much the idea of buying your hardware, set it and forget it. Invest in a good load balancer you're happy with. Invest in a router for for everything. Run it all into that load balancer. Wire everything after the load balancer and you're good. I love the simplicity of it. You do it once. However, two advantages for Speedify. And I say this with absolutely no commercial affiliation to Speedify. I've just been using and testing them on a Linux computer. That's my only relationship to Speedify. The failover events on Speedify were much, much better. They were much quicker. Speedover on the TP-Link was about 20 seconds when I was using Google Chrome. Because as I said, it needs to figure out a different way to the internet. Now, maybe that's an application layer delay and not a network level delay. Using Speedify, those failovers, they have a thing in their app called seamless failovers as a feature. And it really was, it actually was a seamless failover. When I simulated a failover, pulling out the pulling out the ethernet cable from the cellular, it was seamless. There was no, there wasn't even a second, it just the connection continued. So those are just two and I'm sure there are many other ways. I didn't talk about open MPTC because they haven't tried it myself yet. That's definitely something I'd love to attempt. Running Speedify on a rider would be cool as well. It supports Ubuntu and it supports Raspberry Pi, but it will not at the time. I'm recording this run on top of, I believe other Linux distros. I don't know if there are Fedora. There are, of course there are Fedora. There's Red Hat servers. I think it's just Ubuntu. I don't even know if it run on Debian server, but don't call me to that. Check their website and Raspberry OS. So if you can get your own hardware, put Ubuntu server on it and you've got enough ethernet ports to wire everything up. It'll you can run Speedify on the rider level. Otherwise, it's the device level program. And that's one thing I don't like about it. I would prefer not to save money because I get enough licenses to have everything. Just prefer for simplicity to be running it on a rider like the load balancer does. And then I know that everything connecting through it is going to be getting that better connectivity. So that would be my preference, but next project. Hope this video is useful. Two ways to improve your home internet. Two, let's say, more advanced ways, typically stuff like connection bonding has been big amongst, believe it or not, broadcasters and nowadays internet streamers, because if you're if you're broadcasting from a place and you need cellular, you want to have you want to make sure that you don't lose packets when you're broadcasting. So they've been using it for a while. Teradeck do cellular bonding solutions and it's becoming more popular and as a work from home home based business user, not able to get what I need from the conventional residential home internet solutions, both these sort of setups have really improved my internet at the point where I'm just kind of like making the last tweaks just to get it really there to that 100 percent level of sort of uptime stability, robustness that I'm looking for. So thank you guys for watching. If you want to get more videos about home networking connectivity backup failover, all these topics, please feel free to subscribe. There will be more than coming out.