I currently have an MT1300 and MT3000 but only brought the MT3000 with me on our trip. The hotel I am staying at has mediocre 14mbit wifi which is really slow especially with 4K streaming. I was looking at getting an Opal SFT1200 to add as a second wifi connection and then connect via ethernet to my MT3000 as a loadbalanced second connection and then have the MT3000 connect via wireguard to my home. Has anyone tried a config like this out to see how well it works?
Load balancing across multiple connections isn't supported and won't work anyway due to the fact that load balancing can't split connections.
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So does that mean the documentation here for multi-wan load balancing is incorrect as this is essentially what I’m looking to accomplish with the addition of running a VPN on top.
No, not really.
The system will assign interfaces to new connections based on the load ratio.
The new connections is the important thing. It won't work with VPN because VPN is only 1 connection and can't be distributed over different WAN links.
What if each router has it’s own VPN connection?
I don't get what your goal is.
Goal is to increase total available throughput by aggregating WAN connections (each are a WiFi at a hotel). Ideally these connections will go over a VPN back to my house. The WiFi at the hotel artificially limits speeds to 14Mbit/s per connection.
This will still not work since you want to split 1 connection (4K stream) over 2 connections.
One 4K stream consumes pretty much the entire allotment of bandwidth. My goal would be to have additional bandwidth available for other things like an additional 4K stream, web surfing, or whatever else. I get that I running a single speedtest won't show a max of 28mbit/sec but running two speed tests simultaneously for two different sites, I would expect that total aggregate throughput to be 28mbit/sec. Is this not the case?
There is a massive difference between WAN aggregation which is what you are seeking and which none of these (or indeed any standard home user) routers offer and WAN load balancing which can split (rather than aggregate) your traffic to different WAN pathways to improve data flow. I had tried to achieve what you are wanting to do but it was very unstable and quite flakey and not really practical in any way. Best I could achieve due to my slow broadband at home was to use the affordable TP-Link ER605 as the only decent load balancer for my budget and technical ability.
I’m fine with WAN load balancing vs WAN aggregation as long as the effective result is that with multiple clients hitting different end points results in an overall effective doubling of throughput. I’m not expecting a single client hitting a single endpoint to double the throughput. If my understanding of what would happen in my use case is wrong, let me know.
It would be easier to just split the devices to each router, so your 4K streaming device to router A and your cell phone to router B, as an example.
Since this is used by my whole family, manually splitting between SSID’s would likely be less intelligent and effective if my proposed approach works. I may hold off for now until I can test this in a controlled environment to see how having multiple clients reacts with my current gear. Will report back on my findings.
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I, for one, would be really interested to know your findings.
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