I've got a fairly complicated setup, and am looking for some pointers on ideal setup.

We've got a 2927Lac juggling 3 different WAN connections in an area with very poor power availability and associated connection drops.

Router and WAN2 Router are on UPS.

WAN1: Starlink (on Bypass) - 200 Down, 17ish Up
When power fails, there is a 20 sec delay till standby genny kicks in. This results in a short, but acceptable period of downtime.
WAN2: LTE modem - 50 Down, 40 Up
LTE: 8 Down, 5 Up

When the power goes down either the cell tower WAN2 or the LTE connection is pointing at will go down, but one will stay up (which one stays up varies)

Ideally I'd just be load balancing between all three so that we can get the combined throughput of all three when everything is up, but I'm concerned that the intermittent nature of the throughput will interfere with an optimal load balancing policies. Will happily take suggestions of best setup.
I can get IP's on either WAN1 or LTE to manage router through.

Thanks

Hi Chauc3r,

The load balancing isn't combined into one larger, single, bandwidth. Instead, it is a total that can be shared between all network devices wanting access to the WAN connections, and where a policy hasn’t been specified for a dedicated WAN route to be taken.

The maximum single bandwidth (session) achievable, is via the WAN connection with the highest bandwidth capability. The combined factor, is that of another connection (session) being established at the same time from, for example, the same device, which would be "load-balanced" on to another WAN connection while the other WAN is busy serving the first connection (session) to that same device.

Multiple sessions can utilise more of the available “total” bandwidth but, no single session can utilise all of the combined WAN bandwidths.

Regarding your particular situation, to achieve somewhat seamless browsing during periods of WAN outage/drops, set your WAN load-balance setup to use ‘Session Based’ mode, rather than ‘IP Based’ mode.

In session based mode, if a connection is lost, a new session will quickly re-established communication via the next available WAN, whereas in ‘IP Based’ mode, the session is held, suspended you could say, until the connection returns; or a time-out period is reached.

In session based mode, if a connection is lost, a new session will quickly re-established communication via the next available WAN, whereas in ‘IP Based’ mode, the session is held, suspended you could say, until the connection returns; or a time-out period is reached.

This where fail over comes into play should it not?

Hi ThePIT,

Well, that’s if you chose failover, but this was focussing on load-balancing, as that is what the original poster wants to utilise.

But yes, instead of load-balancing then, the failover WAN would be selected, if that is how you have chosen to configure your multi-WAN setup.

Load-balancing, ultimately, will also failover, as once the load-balancing setup has lost one of its connections, everything will be routed through the remaining WAN(s), effectively serving as a failover for the previously balanced WAN service.