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Multi-WAN balancing 4G Tariffs/Providers?

Another member of the "left behind" club here - 3Mbit down, 0.5Mbit up ADSL with no sign of FTTC or Cable. What makes it even better is that I live in the heart of suburbia, and happen to be on the only street within some radius without FTTC or Cable options. Anyway... it happens.

My usage is around 200GB/month with my current bandwidth constraints, however 300GB/month is probably more realistic without such constraints. I've previously looked into 4G, but the 20-40GB usage caps made this a non-starter. EE's 100GB tariff changes things a bit though.

I've been pondering a few different options, all based on multi-WAN policy based routing...

- Dual WAN: EE 100GB and ADSL. Use the EE where it counts (interactive use, streaming on main TV, work), the ADSL where I don't care or it doesn't matter (secondary TVs, system updates, large downloads, digital purchases etc)
- 3/4x WAN: round robin across 3x EE 100GB - significantly cheaper than topping up a single 100GB to the same cap, added benefit of greater theoretical bandwidth. Perhaps retain the ADSL for backup.
- Multi-WAN: Pick and choose providers - a possibility occurred that it may make sense to hit a Three all-you-can-eat tariff first until it gets capped or throttled, then fail over to the EE+ADSL approach.

All of which raise different questions:

1) Is EE's 100GB a full-on unmanaged 100GB so long as you're under the cap? I.e. it's not actually ~3GB/day, or shaped during certain times, or for certain types of traffic?

2) Is using Three's AYCE phone tariff in this manner even worth bothering with? There's a 30GB cap for tethering stated, but the internet is awash with comments suggesting there are users doing TBs/month, and only getting throttled during peak hours, which is why option 3 above seemed feasible. If I'm just going to get to 30GB in a period and then get cut off it's more cost effective to use another EE tariff though. I'm not interested in actively avoiding them detecting that it's multiple devices using it, but if they still don't bother doing much about it, then it's worth trying out on a 30-day rolling contract I would have thought.

3) There are lots of 3x WAN hardware options out there that use 2x Ethernet + 1x USB 4G, fewer if I was looking for 3+ Ethernet WAN port though - how much is a USB dongle going to limit me speed wise, bearing in mind that it will be on the ground floor behind a block wall (and a the top of a fairly noisy RF-wise comms rack), whereas an ethernet based device can be in the loft? Anything over 10Mbit would satisfy me in all honesty, but more is always better.


Any morsels of wisdom would be much appreciated!
 
Bonding Connections etc

Another member of the "left behind" club here - 3Mbit down, 0.5Mbit up ADSL with no sign of FTTC or Cable. What makes it even better is that I live in the heart of suburbia, and happen to be on the only street within some radius without FTTC or Cable options. Anyway... it happens.

My usage is around 200GB/month with my current bandwidth constraints, however 300GB/month is probably more realistic without such constraints. I've previously looked into 4G, but the 20-40GB usage caps made this a non-starter. EE's 100GB tariff changes things a bit though.

I've been pondering a few different options, all based on multi-WAN policy based routing...

- Dual WAN: EE 100GB and ADSL. Use the EE where it counts (interactive use, streaming on main TV, work), the ADSL where I don't care or it doesn't matter (secondary TVs, system updates, large downloads, digital purchases etc)
- 3/4x WAN: round robin across 3x EE 100GB - significantly cheaper than topping up a single 100GB to the same cap, added benefit of greater theoretical bandwidth. Perhaps retain the ADSL for backup.
- Multi-WAN: Pick and choose providers - a possibility occurred that it may make sense to hit a Three all-you-can-eat tariff first until it gets capped or throttled, then fail over to the EE+ADSL approach.

All of which raise different questions:

1) Is EE's 100GB a full-on unmanaged 100GB so long as you're under the cap? I.e. it's not actually ~3GB/day, or shaped during certain times, or for certain types of traffic?

2) Is using Three's AYCE phone tariff in this manner even worth bothering with? There's a 30GB cap for tethering stated, but the internet is awash with comments suggesting there are users doing TBs/month, and only getting throttled during peak hours, which is why option 3 above seemed feasible. If I'm just going to get to 30GB in a period and then get cut off it's more cost effective to use another EE tariff though. I'm not interested in actively avoiding them detecting that it's multiple devices using it, but if they still don't bother doing much about it, then it's worth trying out on a 30-day rolling contract I would have thought.

3) There are lots of 3x WAN hardware options out there that use 2x Ethernet + 1x USB 4G, fewer if I was looking for 3+ Ethernet WAN port though - how much is a USB dongle going to limit me speed wise, bearing in mind that it will be on the ground floor behind a block wall (and a the top of a fairly noisy RF-wise comms rack), whereas an ethernet based device can be in the loft? Anything over 10Mbit would satisfy me in all honesty, but more is always better.


Any morsels of wisdom would be much appreciated!


Three don't permit use of your "All You Can Eat" for any sort of tethered use so that's not really an option.

2 Connections easier to bond than 3 frankly, for a few boring reasons the more you have varying speeds the harder it gets.

Personally if you were sufficiently technically minded I'd get something like a Mikrotik and 2 WAN connections - so one ADSL, and one say 3G/4G based with some ethernet connection both into the Mikrotik and then make extensive use of mangling if you wanted a relatively low cost way to do things.

Many other options exist of course.
 
Three do state a "mobile hotspot allowance" on their top all you can eat phone tariff (£27/mo SIM only on a 30 day), which I understand to mean tethering. What I'm talking about isn't exactly "tethering" though, and they go on to state if you use your 30GB tethering allowance you can always buy more, which suggests there a lot more incentivised to actually detect and cap it now.

It all started with thinking about managing jsut two uplinks, and then heading down the research rabbit-hole led me on to options 2 and 3 - as you suggest though, it seems like managing >2 uplinks in any sensible manner is going to be either complex or impossible to do with total granularity, so I do keep coming back to option 1.

My general level of technical competence is high, but my appetite to learn a new CLI is fairly low, and my desire to learn it inside out so as to be able to rely on it for something in my house fundamental to both business and pleasure is virtually zero. I have a spare-ish server that would make a great pfsense box, but don't really want to go down that road unless I really have to - I don't think I do, the hardware on the shortlist is:

- Draytek 2925: Cheap and cheerful, comes with limitations in terms of both manageability and hardware capabilities, but will do the job here and now without issues it seems.

- Ubiquiti USG-PRO: It should be more flexible, but it seems they're still developing the UI nearly two years from release, and things like policy routing are CLI only for now, but on the roadmap for H1. Generally a turn-off, but in time I think this would end up being the best choice.

Meraki MX64: This was on the list because of its general usability, and ability to manage traffic simply based on the type as opposed to explicit source/destination, but having had a play with a simulator a bit today, it seems it can do shaping based on traffic type, but doesn't allow you to specifiy which uplink, which is a shame. And also not a shame because fairly expensive to buy and then you're faced with the choice every year of either feeding it another licensing or having yourself a fancy £400 paperweight.

I feel like I've pretty much exhausted other options, but always open to ideas...
- FTTC is way off, if ever, from what I've been advised
- Cable is a bit off. We're "in the pipeline" but "on hold" - listening between the lines, I understood at least 12 months
- Local topography is inappropriate for fixed wireless
- The latency makes satellite a non-starter
- Too far from the exchange for EFM
- Bonded DSL (4x) is expensive for what it would offer
- Leased line - workable option, but means either signing up for three years (before which point I'm optimistically hoping that Virgin would be an option), or bearing the full cost of installation on a 12 month contract, which makes that 12 months very expensive. If I had a crystal ball, I would have done it 4 years ago :/

At that point, just feeding the EE 4G top-ups every month is definitely cheaper option, even at 300GB, but then effectively managing the traffic where it counts is cheaper still, and I may not even notice it (and I kind of resent paying by the GB for patch Tuesday across 6 windows machines, or paying more for downloading a PS4 game than the cost of the game itself)

All that of course relies on the EE 100GB being actually 100GB, as opposed to "100GB but only if you use it when and how we say", and I haven't really been able to figure this out with any degree of certainty.
 
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We have the 100GB/mo EE package.

It usually runs out around the end of the month. Getting it working again is a matter of clicking "Buy" on the web page that renders, so buy another 20GB, and it's working again. When it reaches the end of the allowance it doesn't accrue huge data costs, it just stops working.

The most straightforward option for you would perhaps be to have two of those SIMs (swap to the next one when all used up), or, call EE and see if they'll be flexible enough to provide you with a 200GB SIM.

The person at the other end of the phone probably won't be able to do it but it may not be beyond the realms of possibility. People like to sell things and to sell more expensive things. Would be interested to hear if this approach works.

I wondered about doing this myself but we only just go over the 100GB anyway.
 
I ordered the router yesterday - I went for the Draytek option whilst I'm still testing the theory, and it offers pretty comprehensive traffic analysis, so I think I'll stick with the 100GB for at least a couple of months and then figure out how to use it a bit better before I go for another 100GB. I figured I should be able to manage the two at the network level, as opposed to SIM swapping - just carving off a VLAN and switch in/out ports when one runs out, or that's the theory anyway. I should even be able to script it, so my wife can do it if it needs a swap when I'm away.

EE are going to give me a call on Friday though, so if it transpires that they can do 200GB at a better £/GB than the 100GB tariff then I'll be there. Otherwise a "wait and see" approach seems to make more sense for now.

How much are the 20GB top-ups? I was thinking that topping up would be easier than managing two SIMs, but sales support on a web chat said that the largest chunk is 10GB for £15, and that gets very expensive doing any more than the slight overage here and there.
 
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From memory since that screen doesn't come up often - there are three options to choose from which IIRC are 5GB, 10GB and 20GB.

20GB is £20.

You don't pay then and there, you just press the BUY button and it gets added to the next invoice, and access is reinstated immediately.

The only slight bugbear with it is that we have our router configured as a VPN client so everything is behind that, and when it runs out, the router takes a while to realise and drop the VPN so in the intervening time it just behaves as if the internet has "gone away" since it can't reach or render the EE page. So on realising that it has run out I have to log into the router and manually disconnect the VPN, press the top-up buy button, then turn it back on again.
 
Hmm, good to know. I suppose in my setup, the second I hit the cap and it's unable to ping 8.8.8.8 or whatever, it will kill the EE uplink and fail over to the DSL, so would need similar manual intervention. Possible to top up via a different portal or account management page?

Can you set up EE so that it sends you an alert when you reach a certain level - I'm thinking 90GB or so, and then I can make a call as to whether it's worth pro-actively topping up. I could do this in the router, and would hope that the what the router thinks has gone out is roughly equivalent to what EE thinks, but there's bound to be at least a bit of a mismatch.

£20/20GB isn't too bad - it could be worth just topping up with the lower monthly commitment in that case. With the way the caps have gone up over the last 12 months, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I higher tariff crops up in the next 12 months to which I can upgrade.

Have you tried any compression, and any decent results? I.e. at the VPN level or via Opera for browsing for example?
 
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Haven't seen a data usage monitoring alert function, although there may be one.

You can simply go to a web page (if the VPN client is off) which shows your usage in real time. Authenticates via the SIM so you don't need to log in. Same with the top up page.

Would be handy to be able to top it up when away, so externally; I think you can set up an "account" and log in, however EE's online portal is not terribly reliable at the best of times. My suspicion is that you'll need to be on that connection e.g. via the SIM, to top up that SIM. So you need to be where that is. However this may not be so.

Haven't tried any compression tools. Streaming TV is the thing that kills the data since it will always pull the highest quality stream as it's fast enough to do it. If I were determined to do so I could probably set up QOS to limit TV streaming to e.g. 3Mbps, so only ever SD quality.
 
I'm in business!

I placed it on top of my equipment rack in a cupboard on the ground floor and got 6/2Mbit, which was still miles better than my ADSL.

Once I got everything configured for the dual-WAN setup, stripped the modem down to bare basics (e.g. no WiFi, no DHCP, DMZ etc) and carved off a VLAN on my wired network, I threw it up into the loft for this result.

6192421735.png


Whilst I'm absolutely chuffed with that as-is, I'm greedy and I'm sure there's more to give. I have yet experiment with placement (have another switch I can use on the opposite side of the house that may bear better results), and I have yet to order an external aerial.

Are you getting your 50/50 straight off the E5180 or using it with an external aerial? (or using a different modem all together?)

I can use something suitably enormous if it's in the loft, and I'm not entirely against using an outdoor aerial (though the aversion to death versus desire for speed figures in, as it will be atop a 12m ladder).
 
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