Trying to Load Balance Two Cable Internet Connections

So starting on Saturday morning when the guys from Shaw Cable came over and setup my new internet connection (plus some other things for phone and tv) I’ve been trying to load balance my two internet connections. You are probably saying, hey man why do you want to do that, isn’t one connection enough? Well here is the problems I’m trying to solve:

1. ISP’s limit your bandwidth and you have two torrent friendly roommates
2. Over 100gb/month bandwidth costs way too much ($100 and up)
3. Heavy use by multiple people overloads household connections
4. I love figuring out cheap solutions to a normally expensive problem

So I immediately ran over to Google with a ton of search queries including “multi wan open source”. “load balance multi wan”, “open source load balance”. “open source multi internet connection load balance” and so on and so forth. When it comes to open source and linux and bsd there are so many solutions you are absolutely wading through trying to find the right one.  I’m quite familiar with a couple different products that provide this type of functionality but as with many solutions they were a part of another larger product that simply did way too much for what I want.  I don’t want a firewall, I don’t want to load balance with servers in mind and I don’t need any fancy authentication crap or VPN capability.  Here is the list of product I’ve tried out this weekend and the reason why each one of them failed:

1. ZeroShell - I really like this one, it is nice and simple but for some reason simply and completely failed to get an ip address from my cable modem which uses DHCP.

2. PF Sense – Never really got very far with this product because it had a nasty habit of freezing up during the installation process and also did not detect one of my three network cards.

3. Untangle – It works but the catch is they want you to hand over some big money for features like load balancing.  So for a at home project this was simply a no go.

4. Astaro - I’ve used this one a lot at work and it is a nice product with a huge amount of useful features.  However despite my efforts I cannot get it to play nice with uTorrent.  Also there were some issues with keeping both connections up and working but it was by far one of the easier ones to setup.

5. Clark Connect - Still downloading the ISO for this at the moment but I have my fingers crossed that this one is going to be the winner.  From what I’ve read it should do what I want but we will see how this goes.

My ending thoughts are that I maybe should just save myself some time and buy something nice like this: TP-Link TL-R488T

Pre-built hardware appliances are a little pricey for the home market but for someone like me they are definitely an option if all else fails.  If anyone has good suggestions of alternate configurations give me a shout.  I’ll eventually update this blog with my end results.

oh and btw my two internet connections are:

Shaw high speed 7.5mbs down .5mbs up 60gb bandwidth
Shaw extreme high speed 15mbs down 1mbs up 100gb bandwidth

How load balancing works is that when you have multiple applications or downloads occurring the connection with the least usage will take new connections.  Speed is not added together but you can still use both connections fully with applications that use multiple connections like torrents.  Part of the trickiest bit is making sure an even amount of bandwidth is used on each connection. (don’t want to download tons over my 60gb monthly cap connection)