 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. So I've been talking for the last few weeks about my attempts to figure out my home internet situation. I have been having difficult connectivity for the past year. In Israel where I'm based, we have really two infrastructures, basic and hot. Now there technically is fiber optic in some parts of the country, but we can't get fiber optic and that really means there's two internets that are like resold by a bunch of different companies Israel separates between what are called Tashteed providers, infrastructure providers and SAPACs, which are the ISPs. It's complicated exactly what the difference is, but we tried everything and nothing really worked. All the internet options were kind of crappy. So I decided, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm done with this. Like we're having like an hour of solid hour of downtime every day. And you'd call up the ISP, they're like, oh, we're so sorry. Like restart the router and you do this 10 times. You're like, come on. So I figured, well, there's no real options here. The options are very limited. So I started looking and it came across cellular internet. So I set up a cellular router, a 4G router. And what I'm doing now is putting my ISP line into the cellular router. It's nothing fancy, just a TP-Link router. And that does failover. Failover is basically, I like to call it backup internet. So if line A goes down, your ISP line, line B, your cellular line comes up. And when ISP line A comes back, ISP goes back. And this all happens automatically and it's working fantastically. So I'm very pleased about that. But you know what, I spent so much time trying to figure all this stuff out that I came across this thing called bonding so much. And I was like, what's bonding? And bonding sounds like the dream. Like failover is like nice to have a backup connection. But if you have a sucky connection and your backup line isn't that amazing, you're just kind of pulling up and down different kind of bad connections. Bonding sounded like the thing I needed. Bonding is like when you take two or more network interfaces, so wide area networks, ones, and you actually aggregate the bandwidth but you do so in a way that's like completely seamless. So imagine your cellular line, your satellite, your ISP1, ISP2, everything just comes into one seamless trunk of connectivity. And from that, all the speeds are aggregated. All the bandwidth is aggregated. So if you have a 42 line and a 10-5 line and you can get a 50-15 line. Now, what I soon figured out was that bonding is difficult, really, really difficult. So I kept hearing about this company called Speedify and I was a bit reluctant to use them because for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don't like the idea of bonding on a device. I think it makes much more sense to bond at the network level. The second thing was it's a SaaS product and you need to pay a recurring monthly subscription. So I thought if you want to really figure out your home internet connectivity, invest in it once, invest in quality hardware that you own and you don't have to pay any monthly subscription. I didn't like that model, but I spent enough time trying to figure out bonding, running into dead ends that I said, you know what, I'm going to give it a shot. Bonding, you can do it on a home network, but it's tricky. Load balancing is not the same thing and that's the thing that, from what I understand, a lot of people commonly get confused with because there are systems like OpenWRT that support some kind of one aggregation, but it's not the same thing as bonding. It's more load balancing. You've got different applications and different IPs. You'll put across the ones in different ways, but you're not going to create this beautiful layer. Then there's a thing called OpenMTPT. There's another Ryder firmware and it's just so complex. You need to use a VNC and you need to, it's only for certain firmware support and I was like, seems to be to get actual bonding. You either need to go ahead and spend thousands of dollars on an enterprise-grade piece of hardware or you need to do something crazy complicated that could break normal hardware. So I'm like, you know what? I give up. I got fillover working. I did not get bonding working, but let's give Speedify a shot. So that's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to just give it a test and show you guys how it actually looks on Ubuntu Linux. So here is the speed tester. So firstly, let me measure the baseline connectivity. So let me just explain everything going on here. I have Speedify open, but I haven't connected. I'm not connected on my network manager. I'm only connected to my home internet. I've just taken down the Wi-Fi connectivity completely. So this is my ethernet connection here. I'm just going to measure the speed again. You can see wireless network has gone down. So we're getting like 40, 41, 40 on the download. Now I'm not going to show you guys the upload speed because I want to censor my IP address and it's really hard to find one of these speed measurement things that doesn't automatically show your IP. It's been driving me crazy actually. So fast.com is the only one I found. So if I click show more info, it'll show my IP. So just trust me, it's 40. There's no tricks going on here. Let's do one more test. We'll take two measurements on both. Now upload matters a lot to me, but probably download matters more like most people, although upload's been tricky traditionally for me. So I'm getting 41 on the download. So now let me go ahead and switch over to... I'm going to switch from home internet to my hotspot. So the hotspot is the phone here, putting out a hotspot. My computer is connected over Wi-Fi. And this is cellular connectivity here. So now I'm on my hotspot. And again, I can't really detach network manager because it's going to be hard. So you can see it's predictably a lot slower. Getting way only like three, four, three megabits per second. So that's my cellular. So my wired is 40. My cellular is 3.6 to 4. So if this bonding thing really works, you'd expect that we'd get like, I don't know, 44. Let's just do one more time. So we test each connection twice. Now, while that excitement's going on, I'm going to just show you guys the Ubuntu client for Speedify. So here it is in all its glory. And what it does is it's showing now that I'm using my Wi-Fi, right? My Wi-Fi is what's up. I signed up for a month here. And server is fastest server. And connection settings. Now, you'll see that once I add, once I bring my Wi-Fi back up, it's going to show that as well. And then they're supposed to be bonded. So a bonding mode is I'm going to switch it to speed to give it the best possible chance of making a difference to my connectivity here. And I am not going to go with any of the other settings. Now, I'm going to go into my network manager and I'm going to reconnect to Ethernet. So I've just re-enabled the Ethernet connection. And there you go. Now we can see that we have Ethernet. Speedify disconnected. So I need to enable Speedify. And now Speedify is going to be bonding my hotspot with my Ethernet. And it's going to be telling me what my speeds are. It's starting to test the connections you can see. So this is all quite exciting what's going on here. So it sees I'm in Israel. And we're getting the two connections. And by the way, just getting this far is like further than I could get using Ubuntu. In Ubuntu there is bonding a network manager. To try bond an Ethernet on a Wi-Fi device is a disaster. It's like not user friendly at all. You have to bond only Ethernet devices. I can show you that in another video, but everything about bonding I've tried so far has been difficult. So this seems great. So far it's like what did I do? I installed a client. I connected two devices. I opened it up. And now it's supposed to be putting them together. So far so good. We've got Ethernet. I'm just going to show you guys that it is indeed. I failed in my IP address masking. What can you do? We have IP. We have the Wi-Fi and we have the Ethernet. Okay, let's go. Are we going to do better? What did I say? 44 would be... It's not actually better. We've bonded the devices and we are not seeing a speed improvement. Let's try one more time. Okay, this time we're getting up to 41, 42. So it's kind of aggregating the two connections and it's touching it up slightly. So let's take the average of that between those two figures. So my conclusion is that speedify does work a little bit. The speeds improvements are probably not as dramatic as some might hope. And it could be useful if you're trying to put together two internet connections but I didn't see dramatic increases. That's what I would say about it. So is this something I keep on my machine? I probably wouldn't pay 15 bucks a month just to get like one or two megabits per second better even if that's all the aggregates going to be. It might be that in my case with a weak cellular line and a weak ISP, it's not really worth investing in bonding. I'll just stick to failover. But it does appear to work to an extent. Let's just give it a third go to be fair. Third time lucky. Can we get to something like 44, something that's quite a bit above our baseline? 41. So that is the result of my test. And you know what? As I've already unveiled my secret IP, the upload is four. So that is not, well, it's measured it. Oh, sorry. It's still measuring 9.5. What I'm typically getting on the ISP connection is something in the region of 10. So it doesn't look to me like that's really speeded, sped up that much either. So yeah, Spotify, a speedify, looks like a cool concept, but I'm not entirely sure I'd be blown away by what I've seen about it so far. That's my initial impression using it for a bunch of Linux.