Hacker News Reader

Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

How does the "redundant" mode work? You cannot just double TCP packets as within that protocol it's a sign of congestion, it will drastically reduce the throughput. Does this include VPN-ing through some service that can understand duplicates and clean them up?

View on HN

As someone mentioned you can round-robin connections, but then you don't get failover (without interruption, anyway).

What I think most of these solutions do is use MPTCP or a custom homebrew protocol to a server that then holds the actual TCP connection you want. So a slightly more complicated VPN. There is an open source project for this:

https://www.openmptcprouter.com/

OP is using a commercial VPN that does this.

There’s more than one choice in the space.

wich one??

Speedify (it’s in the article…)

Peplink also has their own but it’s geared towards businesses and is pricey.

As someone with a similar setup to the OP, I should mention: OpenMPTCPRouter's networking is completely amateur compared to Speedify. It's a grab bag of half-baked multipath VPN experiments (glorytun over UDP, an outdated MPTCP-based fork of glorytun, and MLVPN), none of which approach the completeness of Spotify's implemention. They generally don't handle changing interface bandwidth, packet reordering, packet aggregation, header compression, mode switching between redundant and aggregation, or any other hard problems here. Hopefully this will save someone the pain of setting these up just to be disappointed.

>Does this include VPN-ing through some service that can understand duplicates and clean them up?

Based on other comments here, I think that's exactly what Speedify is.

Maybe it determines whatever route is faster when talking to a specific host for the first time, or every so often, and then sticks to that route for that specific host?

All the connections are likely being used to talk to the same speedify server. Only once the packets make it to that server do they get forwarded to the destination.

Yes, it relies on a gateway server, effectively a VPN. The gateway server deduplicates packets, reorders them, and then forwards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com