Load balancing- will it double my bandwidth?

[dumontict]

Forgive me, I have an idea but it might be complete nonsense. I am the HOD, and my technician is Italian. And sometimes things get lost in translation, and he's no expert with Internet technologies, nor am i.

 

We have two lousily slow commercial ADSL lines, both under 1Mbps. We cannot yet afford to upgrade and in Italy it is a very expensive and slow process anyway. Our router is old and I fancy something with load balancing features, as we sometimes lose one of the lines. Will it also increase the bandwidth if they are joined together? Or am i dreaming? We have less than 10 admin users for one of the lines, and then more than 200 for the other! Thats because the Admin guy is too selfish to let us use his line, so I want to join them and divide up some of the bandwidth more appropriately.

 

Any suggestions on hardware/software/explanations would be gratefully appreciated. I have plenty of suppliers trying to sell me solutions but they want to charge a lot for what might be a marginal gain.

[Michael]

You can buy load balancing devices to virtually join several ADSL lines, which appear as one link. In practice, yes it can increase speeds, but also adds redundancy too.

[paulellam]

I believe Draytek have a router for this purpose.

[Guest Guest]

Will 1 user get 2 mbps? No

Will 2 users get 1mbps each? Yes (well potentially, it depends on how the load balancing is achieved but in your case your 210 users will have their connections shared between the 2 lines but not necessarily a 50/50 split)

Edited October 19, 2012 by Guest

[dumontict]

Thanks to Sparky and Michael for the above info. We had a company in today to flog us a new licence for our existing Fortigate 110C firewall as it has expired. It seems it is insufficient for our 400 + users, and they'll quote for a new one. They reassuringly advised they could load balance both ADSL lines, and set up separate policies for the users to stop the pesky video streaming from hogging our bandwidth. It may cost us a fortune in hardware and licences, but at least i feel better advised now. We may even have a go with teachers and Facebook : /

 

Apparently both lines are 4Mb, but the guarantee is only 640Kb for each. In reality we are somewhere near 2Mb, although feels like 56Kbps at times.

Edited October 19, 2012 by dumontict

[SchoolsBroadband]

Thanks to Sparky and Michael for the above info. We had a company in today to flog us a new licence for our existing Fortigate 110C firewall as it has expired. It seems it is insufficient for our 400 + users, and they'll quote for a new one. They reassuringly advised they could load balance both ADSL lines, and set up separate policies for the users to stop the pesky video streaming from hogging our bandwidth. It may cost us a fortune in hardware and licences, but at least i feel better advised now. We may even have a go with teachers and Facebook : /

 

Apparently both lines are 4Mb, but the guarantee is only 640Kb for each. In reality we are somewhere near 2Mb, although feels like 56Kbps at times.

 

Hi there,

 

look at getting either a Foritgate 80C or 100D. They will both do the job. You will though need an ADSL modem as the Fortigates don't come with an ADSL port on board (neither does you 110C for that matter).

 

Balancing will not give you double the speed in one single download / upload. Instead it will spread user requests over both lines.

 

Bonding will give you double the speed in one single download / upload. This is more expensive to do. We do bonding in the UK and in theory could do the same in Italy via our hosted bond in our UK data centre but this would add a bit of latency and may not be ideal for you.

 

If you need any advice do let me know.

 

Thanks

 

Dave