EnzoConqueror wrote

@TheBundu 

 

I have same question, what is the purpose of load balancing when one ISP become slower and not utilized the ISP with faster speed?

If anyone could explain in layman terms, it would be great.

@EnzoConqueror I think I have figured this one out too. A load-balancing router is to distribute the load of all the machines utilizing the connection in your home across multiple ISP connections in that location. That traffic can be much faster overall for everyone put together since more than one connection is being used to cater to the needs of all parties. So, your total bandwidth available in your home for everyone's computer put together is the sum of the individual bandwidths of your connections, but per connection request will only have the maximum bandwidth of the one ISP/connection being used for that request at that time.

In other words, if

ISP connection 1 :100 Mbps, and

ISP connection 2 : 200 Mbps

then with a load-balancing router, the total bandwidth for all phones + laptops etc. connected to that load balancing router = 200 + 100 = 300 Mbps. However,

any one connection request at a time, say, playing a video on your iPhone, will either have a 100 Mbps or 200 Mbps connection speed, depending on which of the two ISP connections that video request is being routed through by the load balancing router. 

Similarly, it is possible that a Zoom call in your PC that is running simultaneously may be routed through the other ISP, so may have the corresponding bandwidth of that ISP it is using. 

Get it?

But, your load-balancing router will not know what is the constant speed available per ISP unless you tell it what it is in the settings. Now, the total speed of per ISP connection remains somewhat static when it comes to broadband connections, so you can safely specify it in the load-balancing router, and it will then take that difference into account when routing traffic. For example, in the above scenario, if you specify what speed you can get per connection, and tick the option to 'Enable Bandwidth Based Balance Routing on port(s):', and then if the load-balancing router gets 3 requests simultaneously from three different devices (I have taken this context for the sake of simplicity), then I think it will route two of those requests in the 200 Mbps line, and the remaining request in the 100 Mbps line. 

However, if your ISPs aren't broadband connections that have fixed speeds, instead are 4G+ LTE connections, then, at least in my case here in India, I can't specify the pre-set speeds of each connection since it is wildly erratic, and can go up and down by 50% or more quite easily. Even so, in my case, while the load-balancing router may not solve my problem that I described in my previous post, it will still reduce the amount of average slowness I could witness overall across all devices and requests over a period of time. And even when it is slow at a point in time, if I merely refresh the page, or quickly reconnect to the LAN or Wi-Fi and then refresh the page, it will probably route it to the other ISP, thereby restoring my connection. This is assuming I haven't checked the option 'Enable Application Optimized Routing'; this option is explain above by @Landcruiser. Additionally, when I see too much slowness at any given point in time across a few request, and I know which connection has slowed down, if someone who knows how to change settings on the load-balancing router is available, one can simply switch the slower ISP off or manually reduce it's priority temporarily till we log back in some hours later and test it and discover that it has picked up, and then we could revert those changes. If I didn't have a load-balancing router, I would have been struggling to connect to the other WiFi at home in a more lengthy process.

Did I get this right, @Landcruiser ?

@TheBundu 

If the Application Optimized Routing is unchecked, the load balancer can sum the available bandwidth for a single user but there are programs that don't work with it because they can't accept the connection from multiple sources.

If you want to prioritize a WAN connection for specific use-case in a specific computer, there is a trick:

If your computer can connect to the local network both via ethernet and wifi, as the MAC address of your computer is different for wired and wireless connection, you can configure a routing policy in the R605, and define e.g. wired connection to let go through WAN1, wireless to let go through WAN2.

You can define the route for each device if you wish. Or just your computer and everything else going through the other WAN port. Or timing the route policies, at night sending every (or some specific) device to a specific WAN port.

The router can't detect the speed and the reliability of your ISPs. It can only detect if the connection is online of offline, however it didn't really work for me when the connection of the 4G ISP was just rubbish and not offline.