I’m essentially brand new here, and brand new to the idea of load balancing, so please forgive my ignorance.
I’ve been told the GL-AR750S EXT can load balance. Here’s what I’ve got:
2 cell phones – roughly equal on the same network
A 4-port hub to which I can connect both phones
A GL-AR750S EXT router (FWIW I also have a GL MT300N-V2 if THAT router would be more usable for load balancing)
I found a sort-of set of instructions at github – “OpenWrt - GL.iNet AR-750 Use LAN port as 2nd WAN in order to use Mwan3”
But I have no idea what they’re telling me. Why am I using a LAN or whatever to load balance two cell phones? The whole thing seemed very arcane and confusing.
So, CAN I load balance with the hardware I have? One phone is always plugged into the router, the other would come and go – so things need to work when there’s only 1 phone plugged in (I know it won’t load balance without 2 phones, but it can’t turn into a brick)…
If so, is there a reasonably simple, idiot-proof set of instructions for exactly what I have to do to make this work?
As you have 2 phones, or if you have extra cable as internet resource, you can use all of them as Internet and have load balance on these connections.
Load balance will improve your network stability. For example, once one connection failed, the Internet will go through another direction. It could distribute your network into different connections and improve your network speed.
But, as you said, this may need IT skills. The overall result may not be as good as you expected.
So I do not recommend this kind of load balancing for personal use.
If you mean this guide and if that’s to complicated, I doubt you have the skills required to setup up a double tethering balancing setup and troubleshoot it when needed.
Don’t get me wrong; The device can do it, but it will requires some setting things up of things in Luci (advanced gui) and might require some scripts to restart or trigger things when connection are lost and to make it make set-and-forget or in your case: detect the plugging in of that second phone and verify/adjust the config of the second WWAN interface to be attached to the phone.
In simple terms you need 2 things.
Setup load balancing just like it would be with 2 ethernet WAN. Any guide that can explain you how to setup that will help setup 99% of what you will need to do.
Adjust the 2 (W)WAN interfaces to use phone tethering instead of the ethernet ports. (So change the device of (W)WAN1 from ETH?.? to USB0 and of (W)WAN2 from ETH?.? to USB1) This is by FAR the easy part, as it really means change 2 radio-buttons, save and apply.
The guide you pointed me at looks different than the one I saw, but they’re about equally opaque. It doesn’t sound like Gl-Inet provides any kind of guide for a normal user to do this, so worst case I’ll either toss the idea on the “screw it” pile, or find a product that does load balancing out of the box.
Pepwave is by far one of the best companies for load balancing, followed by cradle point, inseego has some hardware as well… all are very good ‘out of the box’ options… the biggest issue you face is if you’re trying to shotgun them together to increase your speed. That’s what is called bonding. Best option for most people is a small form factor windows PC using speedify vpn, they even make one without fans that works great. There’s a video of one if you youtube speedify rv setup… the guy was bonding 3 jetpacks through it. had a small touch screen and a small keyboard with touch pad. Pepwave’s got their own vpn system that bills by the bandwidth usage but their router’s are expensive as compared to using the speedify setup.