Does anyone know a easy to way to take 2 backhauls and load balace between them? What switches would I want? What we are looking for is we have a 20 meg backhaul connection our office to a tower. That is pretty much maxed at peek times. We are planing on running fiber to the tower from the office but that wont happen for a month or so and we are looking for an easy way to just through up another backhaul and load balance between them?
Anyone done this?
Linksys RV042 Dual Wan Router. 200Mbps throughput per port.
CMM <–> RV042 <–> BH1 <–> Core Switch <–> Core Router
…^–> BH2 <–^
Two BH’s on the same tower in the same band should run v7.1.9. Get the two as far from each other as possible, use reflectors on both ends to reduce self interference, and try to get the frequencies as far from each other as possible.
Alternately a BH in another band would negate all of the above.
One of our customers is asking for something similar, with the objective of providing redundancy.
From the “radio” point of view, there should be no problems: just put some distance between the devices, use synchronization, distant channels and set the same uplink/downlink percentage on both links (am I wrong ?).
Or use different bands as suggested above, of course.
I’ve doubts regarding the other networking devices (layer 2)
I think it’s quite easy for the RV042 (or equivalent) to realize when a radio link is down, even if the ethernet links are ok : it just receives frames from a single port and no data from the other ()
And even packet reordering should not be a big problem (I hope 
)
But, how does it know the effective bandwith of the two links ?
How does it schedule the frames ?
Is it aware of any high priority traffic ?
Does it load-balance “per class of service” ? “per connection” ? indifferently ?
Things will surely go smooth with light traffic (as usual ), but would I experiment unfairness in case of congestion ?
… or maybe I’m just over-paranoid
() that means: if no traffic is coming from the other side, I’ve no way to determine if the link is down, unless I monitor the BH, via snmp for example.
Not paranoid, diligent.
My suggestion above was meant as a temp solution until his fiber came in. I don’t think I would trust my backhaul link to a Linksys device.
For a customer (end user) looking for a redundant link, I think the Linksys or DLink Dual WAN routers work fine. The DLink I set up is configured to balance - if one fails the other handles all fo the traffic.
I pulled each connection and it never missed a beat.