Load balancing / bonding with 2 mikrotik LTE?

[aleesi]

I'm definitely no expert here be easy on me  

I have a chateau LTE and the new ATLGM with a cat18 modem. I was very happy with vodafone until I notice B1/B3 get disconnected often times specially over the weekend. As a result the download is been halved and when I tried with Three I noticed the same behaviour with B1 been offline at night time and during weekends. 

I was wondering if it anyone has ever tried to combine two different ISPs (in this case from two different 4G providers) to increase the throughput. 

I've gone throught the Mikrotik wiki below but I'm complete lost, not sure what approach would be suitable if this was possible at all (been LTE interfaces) 
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Load_Balancing

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Seán]

I didn't realise Vodafone is now turning off bands 1 and 3 during the day for energy saving, especially with band 1 being their 5G DSS band, unless that mast is not operating 5G.

Unfortunately, combining two internet connections is not as simple as connecting two routers together due to each Internet connection operating on a separate public facing IP address. When you download or stream something, the incoming packets are routed back to the originating IP address that established the connection. While technically you could have some connections run over each ISP to balance the load, this would cause problems with websites that expect users to connect from one IP address only at a time, such as banking websites. If their server suddenly sees the same user session operating across two IP addresses, they may detect the IP address as operating with a hijacked session cookie or unauthorised account sharing (e.g. Netflix).

The easiest option I'm aware of for combining two Internet connections is with a third party service such as Speedify (link). What this type of service does is split the outgoing and incoming packets across both Internet connections and combine them at each end so they run over a single public facing IP address provided by the service, much like a VPN connection. The catch is that both routers need to be connected to your PC for Speedify to work (I don't think Speedify can load balance multiple devices such as TVs, set top boxes, etc.) and the latency will be higher as it will be a combination of the latency to their load balancing server and then out the internet to the hosts you connect to.

Another option is run some some hosts over one ISP and other hosts over the second ISP. In this case you would set up an Ethernet port on your Chateau as a separate WAN port and connect your ATL LTE18 to it. You would then set up IP routing rules on the Chateau specifying which blocks of IP addresses to run over the second ISP, such as route YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. IP ranges over the port connected to the ATL LTE18 and have everything else run over the Chateau's own connection.

With the cost of the two Internet connections and a load balancing service, it may be worth looking at Starlink, particularly if both Vodafone and Three are running slow in the evening, e.g. under 10Mbps like what happens with my Three connection some evenings when the mast does not enable band 1. Starlink recently reduced their price to €65/month and the hardware / dish costs €450+delivery.

[aleesi]

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the detailed answer. I gave speedify a go however (at least the free version), both latency and speed (bonded with speedify) seems to get worse. In fairness at least on paper it seems to be a great idea but it doesn't live up to expectations. I think I'm going to go for the second option you mentioned (segregate host / traffic).

Thanks again for the feedback

[aleesi]

A couple of comments wrt Vodafone's bands. I thought they were switching off bands at certain times (off peak) but what it's actually happening is that the mast I'm connecting to does not allow me to do CA with B1-B3 & B20 or B28 as it used to. I had bands B28 / 1 and 3 locked for the past 4-5 months working fine. Now I can only aggregate either B1&B3 (20MHz) or B3 & 28 (10MHz). So had to remove the qnwlock for B28 and I'm now with B1+B3.

The other thing I learned is that the Chateau LTE12 internal antennae outperforms the ATL LTE18 (both conneted to the same mast and bands B1/B3). The ATL LTE18 mislead me with better signal readings where the Chateau is giving me up to 50% mode Down / Up with worse readings... I've had the ATL LTE18 for the last 3 months and it doesn't suit me.

So scratch the load balancing, out with the ATL LTE18, in with the Chateau LTE12, I'd consider getting a Chateau 5G later on this year as it seems the 4G CA is getting trickier. I left the ATL LTE18 with the second SIM as fail-over.

[Seán]

That's a surprising difference between the Chateau LTE12 and ATL LTE18. I would have expected the ATL LTE18 to perform much better on bands 1 and 3 due to its high gain on those bands, unless there is something physically wrong with the ATL such as a bad or detached internal antenna element.

Try the following command on the ATL LTE18 while a download or speed test is running. This returns the RSRP reading of each antenna element:
/interface lte at-chat lte1 input="at+qrsrp"

The first two values should be close together, e.g. -90m and -92 would be considered OK as they are 2dB apart, whereas -110 and -90 would indicate a problem with the primary antenna element as its signal is 20dB weaker. If it reports 4 values under -140dBm, the 3rd and 4th values are for the 3rd and 4th antenna elements, i.e. 4x4 MIMO.

With bands 20 and 28, I would expect the Chateau LTE12 to perform better as the wavelengths are too wide for the dish to concentrate these lower frequencies. This is the same with the LHG dishes where the dish delivers worse performance than a dedicated antenna on bands 20 and 28.

That's also an interesting discovery with how Vodafone changes its CA capabilities during certain times. At least you are able to get B1+B3 CA.

[Meritez]

I have my Chateau LTE12 wired into two mANT LTE-5o, both pointing in 180 degrees opposite directions to each other.

Throughput is fantastic.

[LITTLEbig]

If you're looking for line bonding take a look at https://www.openmptcprouter.com/ (OMR). OMR is free but it requires some additional hardware and VPS costs but as far as I'm aware it is the only customer grade line bonding possibility. I'm using it and its not ideal and has glitches but is working. The most issues with it arise from high latency LTE ISP connections and also if your DL/UL speeds greatly differ on LTE ISPs I think the better option would be to go with load balancing (can be done on most managed routers - perhaps the cheapest option is Ubiquiti ER-X) solution and not line bonding.