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Good write-up, and worth bearing in mind for a couple of my clients. Something related but probably unnecessary in Suraj's case... Channel bonding (in the net

Good write-up, and worth bearing in mind for a couple of my clients. Something related but probably unnecessary in Suraj's case... Channel bonding (in the networking "not radio frequency" sense of channel) VPNs and similar setups can be used to improve throughput, reliability and consistency, and provide failover etc, by routing traffic across one or more different internet connections. You can use multiple connections through different providers and connection methods. Multiple 4G, or cable + 4G etc. The traffic then gets reassembled or de-duplicated or whatever's required at the server-end, and then sent onwards as normal. Speedify looks like a end-user friendly option and doesn't need dedicated hardware. It's got some other fancy stuff built-in (like redundancy for lossy situations like IRL streaming) and have been around years. I've not used it yet but am an old and happy Connectify Hotspot MAX user. I've been looking at Speedify more closely lately because my cable connection sometimes drops briefly once in the middle of the night. Timing is largely unpredictable, making tracking it down a nightmare. Lasts long to drop me out of any game I'm in the middle of! I have access to multiple cellular connections though, one of which is unlimited and the others may as well be. Some discussion and relevant posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30666248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30666248 - Show HN: SmoothWAN a simple home internet bonding router using Speedify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27088565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27088565 for the HN comments, original content deleted. Reviews: https://www.techradar.com/uk/reviews/speedify https://www.techradar.com/uk/reviews/speedify https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/speedify-review https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/speedify-review

toomuchtodo 4y ago
I use Speedify frequently with an incumbent fiber provider, StarLink, and T-Mobile. Highly recommend.
- bradknowles 4y ago
  I've tried Speedify, several times. I keep forgetting that their exit points are widely blocked by many providers. I guess I could run another VPN on top of Speedify, but then you'd lose all the protocol-specific QoS features and I don't know that the result would really be all that useful. I'm currently investigating Peplink. So far, I'm having a hard time finding hardware that can support gigabit-class speeds with encryption, IDS/IPS, WAN Smoothing, etc... turned on. If you don't turn on any advanced features, sure you can get reasonably high speeds. But if you do turn on all the obvious features one would want, then throughput plunges through the floor. Oh, and their hosted service only goes up to 100-200mbps. Beyond that, you need a dedicated hub.
sithadmin 4y ago
There's a number of 5G/LTE solutions that are designed with this sort of connection bonding in mind at relatively affordable prices. I'm retrofitting a teardrop camper for remote work in the boonies and settled on a Pepwave device+external antenna radome that supports dual active LTE (with 2 SIMs per provider - so you can double up on 'lines' and effectively double your data allotment) and will bond those alongside any other connectivity that happens to be available (wired uplink, WLAN bridge etc). It even does packet inspection so you can elect to route high-priority traffic (e.g. conference calling/video meetings) over the bonded route while allowing less important traffic to use your default route. Very useful when you've got one LTE provider that's 'unlimited' and another that's not. You can either use their hosted offering for the bonding 'endpoint', or deploy your own with a free virtual appliance pretty much anywhere. Proprietary...but it just works. No futzing around with software on endpoints.
- Nexxxeh 4y ago
  I did look at the low-end PepWave offerings but was put off by the pricing, especially when combined with their hosted VPN pricing. I might have misunderstood, but for the bonding feature without setting up my own VPN server in a datacentre it looked like it would require SpeedFusion Cloud product at $589 for every 20TB I transfer. I'd easily hit that in a year at home. That's more than my unlimited fixed line, my primary unlimited 4G/5G, my 15GB per month secondary 4G/5G, my 50GB per year emergency backup 4G/5G (on a third cellular network), and Speedify, per year combined. And if I'm willing to set-up a hosted VPN server, I may as well just set up a local Speedify router instead. I couldn't see the option for redundancy either, where the same traffic is pumped through both lossy interfaces which is especially useful at the edges for 4G coverage, like when IRL streaming in spotty reception. I can see PepWave would have its use-cases, especially for businesses that can justify the expense. But for me it was less flexible and orders of magnitude more expensive. [Edit after sithadmin replied: I think PepWave devices support redundancy as "WAN Smoothing".]
  - sithadmin 4y ago
    Their hosted VPN (FusionHub) service pricing is indeed quite insane. For my use case, I'm using a pretty minimal amount of bandwidth, so I've just deployed my own FusionHub Solo instance.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

I use Speedify frequently with an incumbent fiber provider, StarLink, and T-Mobile. Highly recommend.

bradknowles 4y ago
I've tried Speedify, several times. I keep forgetting that their exit points are widely blocked by many providers. I guess I could run another VPN on top of Speedify, but then you'd lose all the protocol-specific QoS features and I don't know that the result would really be all that useful. I'm currently investigating Peplink. So far, I'm having a hard time finding hardware that can support gigabit-class speeds with encryption, IDS/IPS, WAN Smoothing, etc... turned on. If you don't turn on any advanced features, sure you can get reasonably high speeds. But if you do turn on all the obvious features one would want, then throughput plunges through the floor. Oh, and their hosted service only goes up to 100-200mbps. Beyond that, you need a dedicated hub.

sithadmin 4y ago

There's a number of 5G/LTE solutions that are designed with this sort of connection bonding in mind at relatively affordable prices. I'm retrofitting a teardrop camper for remote work in the boonies and settled on a Pepwave device+external antenna radome that supports dual active LTE (with 2 SIMs per provider - so you can double up on 'lines' and effectively double your data allotment) and will bond those alongside any other connectivity that happens to be available (wired uplink, WLAN bridge etc). It even does packet inspection so you can elect to route high-priority traffic (e.g. conference calling/video meetings) over the bonded route while allowing less important traffic to use your default route. Very useful when you've got one LTE provider that's 'unlimited' and another that's not. You can either use their hosted offering for the bonding 'endpoint', or deploy your own with a free virtual appliance pretty much anywhere. Proprietary...but it just works. No futzing around with software on endpoints.

Nexxxeh 4y ago
I did look at the low-end PepWave offerings but was put off by the pricing, especially when combined with their hosted VPN pricing. I might have misunderstood, but for the bonding feature without setting up my own VPN server in a datacentre it looked like it would require SpeedFusion Cloud product at $589 for every 20TB I transfer. I'd easily hit that in a year at home. That's more than my unlimited fixed line, my primary unlimited 4G/5G, my 15GB per month secondary 4G/5G, my 50GB per year emergency backup 4G/5G (on a third cellular network), and Speedify, per year combined. And if I'm willing to set-up a hosted VPN server, I may as well just set up a local Speedify router instead. I couldn't see the option for redundancy either, where the same traffic is pumped through both lossy interfaces which is especially useful at the edges for 4G coverage, like when IRL streaming in spotty reception. I can see PepWave would have its use-cases, especially for businesses that can justify the expense. But for me it was less flexible and orders of magnitude more expensive. [Edit after sithadmin replied: I think PepWave devices support redundancy as "WAN Smoothing".]
- sithadmin 4y ago
  Their hosted VPN (FusionHub) service pricing is indeed quite insane. For my use case, I'm using a pretty minimal amount of bandwidth, so I've just deployed my own FusionHub Solo instance.