 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosalier. I want to do a video review today, having used a product for the best part of one month of a product called Speedify. Really, really interesting tool for bonding multiple internet connections. I was just telling a couple of friends about it this week who are both hostiling in completely different parts of the world and both had the classic Hostilers conundrum of, well, the internet's not so good and we are digital nomads and, you know, that's kind of the key. So, having spent the last six weeks playing around with my home internet, trying out different connectivity solutions and seeing how they all work, I definitely do think Speedify is a very good tool. And I want to just explain how this works because it looks very, very much like a VPN and it is not a VPN. It's a different thing. So, here is what I was sort of working on during the summer to sort of improve my home internet. Now, where I live in Israel, surprisingly, despite Israel being such a high-tech nation, our internet service provider, our ISP, which is using the kind of old DSL technology because we don't have fiber optic yet. It is, ironically, in some parts of our neighborhood, but it's not on our street. It's very, very localized where they've put down the, I guess, the wires or whatever. So, because of this, I said I need better internet and I work from home for the most part. My wife is sort of in and out between project sites and home and it was both affecting us. We were having, I'd say, a few hours per day where the internet was either down or not working. So, I'm just explaining this now. You're thinking this is a video about speedify. Why are you showing us this? I just want to explain what it does and what it does that is not load balancing because some people on the internet, especially on YouTube, are putting up these videos saying, oh, load balancing, combine multiple connections with load balancing. And that is not the case. That will work in a minority of cases if you're doing something called multi-threading. So, you might have seen a download manager that had this multi-threading feature or even like a peer-to-peer download client. Now, if you have that and you have a load balancer with multiple internet connections, you can pull in from different sources. You might end up getting better speeds, but it's still not the same thing as connection bonding. So, what I've been doing in my home internet setup is using a, this was existing, my router, ISP router. I bought a cellular router. I bought a data sim. I bought a load balancer. Now, these are kind of business grade routers that basically will take and manage multiple connections. And they'll do this thing called failover that if one line drops, they move to the other line and vice versa. And that was working fine for me, but that still doesn't mean that I'm using these multiple connections together. And that's basically what bonding is. Now, there's a big catch with bonding. You could think, well, if you've got two different internet connectivity in your house, you've got ISP, you've got cellular, why can't you just like kind of stick them together and get that kind of super fast internet. And that would be great, but that's not really how the internet works. The problem with how the internet works is that if you take in and combine your different internet sources, well, when you're accessing websites, if you're so much as clicking a button on a website, it's not just the data is coming to you. You're also transmitting data to the internet out to those internet servers. So what you need for bonding to work is actually hardware on the internet side, the wide area network site. And there's an open source project called Open MPTC Prouder, probably pronounced that wrong, but Speedify is basically a commercial service that does that for you. So you need to have a server in the cloud. And that's going to basically take in your connectivity, merge the sources. It's going to give you one internet pipe that is very stable for you to use. And then when you're going out to different websites, it's going to be sending it through different wide area networks. So that could be your ISP line and your cellular line, but you need to have that extra infrastructure there in the cloud. So that's why Speedify, that's why it looks kind of like a VPN because there are servers there that you connect through and you aggregate your connections locally. So if you have your ISP or your Wi-Fi, it doesn't matter. It can be a satellite connection and it can be a cellular connection or it can be two cellular connections or it can be two, one fiber connection and one coaxial connection. You aggregate your connections, you run this client and then the client will do all that really complicated stuff that will make the bonding magic work. So that's basically what bonding is. Speedify is good. So that's why there's a monthly subscription. And versus load balancing, what I would say is that the performance in Speedify is actually better. And I thought this was a nice idea running my own hardware, but it takes about 20 to 30 seconds for failover to happen. So if one internet goes down, it takes 20 seconds to get to internet source 2. The bigger problem I found is when one internet isn't down, it's just kind of really bad. The router doesn't know to failover. So you just stuck with this kind of bad connectivity. Now how does Speedify actually look? So this is the Ubuntu Linux client. Now I know that most people don't use Ubuntu, but there are actually not so many Ubuntu reviews on YouTube. So I thought I'd do one while I'm explaining it. So basically what I've done here is connected my two interfaces. Now what you're looking at here is my primary connectivity. This is my ethernet from the ISP. And I run my cellular line into a ethernet to USB adapter so to get the kind of full speed that I can get more or less out of that connection here. Now it's actually disabled at the moment, but that's within the program. So it's a GUI if you're using Linux, you know what that is. It's a graphical user interface. So you don't need to play around with the command line, which for a lot of people is good. Now the integration with the network manager in Linux is beautiful. It works perfectly. So if I in network manager take away, I'm going to just disconnect now the cellular line. And you can see it lost it pretty much instantaneously. And in network manager, if I re-enable that, it's going to pick it up right away. So there's kind of this two-way process. It doesn't show up in network manager, but it's there. And how you actually use it is you just, I'm just going to bring it over a smub it here. You just turn on the speedify icon and you can turn off speedify. And as you can see, the network manager is instantly seeing what's been going on there. So let me just kind of take a look into the features here that we can have. So there's a few different settings you can use for your connections that you're using in speedify. Now the one thing I don't like about speedify is that it's a device level program. So it will run on Ubuntu and it will run on Ubuntu server and it will run on Raspberry Pi OS. But it will not run on OpenWRT and it will not run on DDWRT. Now at the time of recording, because I know that these things tend to change and they bring out new features. But it's kind of biased at the moment towards being a client level device. And I don't really like that. I think if you're doing this in an office, which would be a great use case. It makes a lot more sense to do this bonding on an appliance than it does on each device accessing it. So you could buy your own Linux server and I'm looking at doing this myself. But it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. And it would be easier if you could just install this as some kind of a program or an add-on to OpenWRT and buy yourself an internet router off the shelf. And just speedify on it and set it up. So that's the one thing about my load balancing system. I like better besides the fact that there aren't monthly subscriptions to pay. On top of my ISP subscription, on top of my cellular line. I like the fact that it's just running in a central location and everything is getting that sort of better networking with speedify. You do get five licenses with each subscription. But I don't know. I just think it's a better approach for something like this on the network level. Now the different settings that you can use are the priority here. So I turned this one off and that was just for demonstration purposes. Now this is my cellular line. So the UI is good. It does a nice job at explaining what all these different features mean. Now the most logical one is secondary in my opinion for something like a cellular line supplementing an Ethernet line. With my load balancer, as I explained, the biggest drawback is that I don't really have a way to handle very weak connectivity. So either it sees it as being on or off and then does failover. You can have speedify run in that manner. There's a setting called backup. And as it says, backup only use this connection for failover when no others are available, does not do bonding for speed. Now if I'm using speedify, I think it makes much more sense to actually use the advantage of true channel bonding versus just using failover. Therefore, I've gone for a primary and secondary configuration. Now you might say, well, hang on, we're using a cellular line here. What about our monthly data cap? If we're going to be using this thing, it's going to be doing lovely things with the speed. But what if we blow through our data limit? So thankfully, speedify have this taken into account and you can configure your data caps directly on the user interface. So there's a daily data cap and I just set up here my monthly one. I need to check if this is really what it is. One thing that's cheap in Israel, there aren't a ton of them is a cellular connection. So I'm not particularly, if I'm using speedify and it's working well, I think I might go for a 50 gig plan because they're not that expensive. And if the top up really increases speed, it's worth it. So you can see it gives you a little counter here for how long you've been using it and you can configure your monthly data cap all the way up to one terabyte of connectivity, which would be pretty big for most mobile networking clients these days. Now you can also choose what it does when you go over that limit. Do you want to stop using it? I'm going to just say stop using it because I also get a data usage tab on the cellular internet company. So it's and I get notifications. I don't really need speedify to tell me what's up in terms of my monthly limits, but it's nice that it has that options. Now, that's that. So I have primary. So I'm actually bonding right now. So it's taking my primary. It's taking the ethernet line. It's recognizing it as two ethernet connections. If you do want to do a setup like this with the cellular router and an ISP router, I would advise getting a networking card with multiple RJ45 ports. You can do what I'm doing and just use a USB device, but it's probably better to actually have real ethernet ports for the connections. But that's basically it. It's doing something that looks a lot more complicated than what's being displayed on the screen here. So these guys up to the cloud and bringing them both down as one pipe and then splitting them up as they go to the cloud. Now, one thing I did not really get with speedify that a lot of people they kind of talk about is this speed increase. And I'm actually okay with that because the only thing I want right now for my internet connectivity is internet that works. I'm not looking for lightning fast internet. I'm looking for minimal downtime and not intermittent connectivity. And the fail over time on speedify is effectively zero. It's completely seamless. It's 20 to 30 seconds using a load balancer. So I didn't really see those speed increases, but that also doesn't bother me. If you're looking for it for that reason, other people have told me that they did get these speed increases. But you know, I'm also using a very weak, pretty weak primary and a not so great secondary connection. So I wouldn't read too much into it. But if you do want to test out your speed, you are able to do that directly in the app. There's a speed testing system here and you can see what kind of connectivity you're getting. So I was getting a baseline of something like 50 and 55 is my typical ISP connection. And the cellular backup is doing something like 15 five. So I was thinking maybe I'll get like 60 20 or something or 60 15. And I just I've gotten a little bumps up on the upload, but nothing really to write home about. So but you are able to test that there. Now the final thing I want to talk about you can choose your connection server. I'm getting 40 15. So yeah, my upload is better than usual. My downloads actually a small bit slower. What important setting is bonding mode. I've gone for a speed mode and there's also streaming modes and there's also redundant mode and you can read about all those differences. So that's basically my evaluation of speedify the yearly plan currently costs about $89. So if you are on the road, if you are simply in my situation where your main ISP isn't great and because it's not great, you've gone ahead and set up something like satellite internet or set up a cellular line or you've gone ahead and brought in two ISPs into your house and you want some way to combine them. Not only combines them for the purpose of failover, but actually combines them in the most sort of technically pure way possible that you'll get those perfect failover events if anything goes down and potentially gets you a speed boost as well. And don't forget that you're tunneling your traffic because you have to be for this to work into the cloud. So that's one positive and negative is that you're going to be entrusting speedify with your data when you use them even though it's going to be encrypted. I always say there's no such thing as a totally secure VPN. You ultimately need to trust that any company handling your data is doing what they say they're doing with it. It also means that you might have potentially some trouble if not now down the road logging into stuff like Netflix that even if you're using a VPN server in your own country, it might be detecting that it's a VPN IP and doing stuff like locking you out. So that's an unwanted addition because for most people using it for bonding are not using it with the intention of getting those VPN benefits from it. So I hope this video was useful. If you are thinking about using Spotify as speedify, then you can check it out on speedify.com just to say that this is a totally independent review based on my testing of the program so far. No incentive to say anything either good or bad about the company. Thanks for watching. If you'd like to get more videos about networking, technology and Ubuntu Linux, please feel free to subscribe.