How Can I Load Balance Two Wireless Routers?

What are the best load-balancing routers?

  • We need a load balancing router for our Home Network. Requirements are: Support two WAN connections, either 1 ethernet/1 DSL or 2 ethernet. Needs to handle dynamic load balancing across both WAN ports Needs to handle DHCP and NAT duties. Does not need to handle Wifi. Needs to be able to support 74 megabit's inbound bandwidth (50 Meg off one port, 24 meg off another). Needs to support up to 25 devices on mix G/N + two fixed devices on the LAN. We have tried the following: Vigor Draytek 2820N - worked relatively well; however would require rebooting more than once eveyr 24 hours. Wireless performance was terrible (but did load balance ok) Netgear 336N : high performance box, however does not dynamically balance across WAN ports (it is either/ or) Billion 7400N and 7800n : has two wan ports but can only access one at a time; wifi performance is ok.

  • Answer:

    I have never had good performance for this application with anything except a freebsd or linux based PC router, or a cisco/juniper real router.

Ryan Lackey at Quora Visit the source

Was this solution helpful to you?

Other answers

Find a sub-$100 Mikrotik appliance that will fit your requirement and use ECMP or some combination of approaches for your "load balance" needs (see the routing wiki) for details.  Based on what you have listed, the RB750G form factor would easily accomplish this. http://routerboard.com/ http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Main_Page http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/ECMP_load_balancing_with_masquerade

Jay Cuthrell

Check out pfSense, it supports dual-WAN links. Its free. Strap it on to an old computer with dual NICs and it works like a charm. http://www.pfsense.org/ Another option that works beautifully is ClearOS (formerly ClarkConnect). See http://www.clearfoundation.com/ (Supports up to 4 WAN Connections)

Faisal Khan

The best equipment I ever saw in production to handle load balancing and also do some tricks with DNS for people who needs to balance inbound traffic via different ISPs, without running BGP, is Radware's LinkProof: http://www.radware.com/Products/ApplicationDelivery/Linkproof/default.aspx Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Radware and don't sell or service their equipment, but a lot of my customers do. I know it's expensive, much more than most of the other solutions mentioned here, but has tons of features. I know it's used by some big banks here in Brazil to handle traffic in the range of hundreds of Mbps, and that they really like it because it's very reliable.

Carlos Ribeiro

Evan Thomas

A MikroTik RB750G or maybe an RB450G would be ideal. Using ECMP (Equal Cost Routing) would be the best, and simplest solution.

Nick Shore

Just Added Q & A:

Find solution

For every problem there is a solution! Proved by Solucija.

  • Got an issue and looking for advice?

  • Ask Solucija to search every corner of the Web for help.

  • Get workable solutions and helpful tips in a moment.

Just ask Solucija about an issue you face and immediately get a list of ready solutions, answers and tips from other Internet users. We always provide the most suitable and complete answer to your question at the top, along with a few good alternatives below.