Comment by uKVZe85V | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uKVZe85V | Hacker News Reader

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On top of this plethora of technology and various providers, doesn't bonding all links to a single solution provider (Speedify) create a single point of failure?

From https://speedify.com/features/

> What kinds of servers do you have? > We use a combination of dedicated and virtual servers, depending on location and scalability needs. All of our servers have at least 1 Gbps network access and are optimized for bandwidth intensive usage such as live streaming, video conferencing or online gaming.

Let's assume the best case, where Speedify implements this as swarms of redundant servers, so that even if some servers or datacenters are down it may continue to work.

I could not find in the article any mention of disabling Speedify and falling back to using a single provider, or a local bonding solution like described on https://wiki.debian.org/Bonding .

Isn't speedify still a "single point of failure", in the sense that any incident with Speedify (e.g. accounting glitch of any kind) may cause the whole contraption to fall like a house of cards?

Alex from Speedify here. Yes, exactly, we have swarms of redundant servers. The servers are very reliable, but in case of failure, you're on another server in 30 seconds.

Your comment makes me realize we may need more options on what to do when the connection fails. Security-types had us add a "kill switch" to make sure traffic couldn't get out when the encrypted tunnel fails. But if you don't care about that, another option to guarantee it would go right out, would make sense too.

Does Speedify have an open source client?

I'd be interested in paying for the service but not willing to run closed source software locally and then send all my traffic to it.

Use Speedify as the underlay network then run a self-hosted VPN on top (configure in the UniFi Dream Machine Pro). :)

That works, and has been done before. It can be confusing to run Speedify and the VPN client on the same box, but if there's a Speedify router box with the internet, and another box with the VPN client, it should just work.

just from reading the article, it sounds like speedify does a lot of packet inspection to prioritize traffic. Wouldn't a VPN negate that?

Not at this point, sorry.

Hey Alex,

Just wanted to drop in this thread and let you know I think you have an awesome product and I have been happily using speedify for almost a year now. I hope you keep up the great work and are able to keep growing!

The UniFi Dream Machine Pro has a backup WAN link. I plug my backpack nighthawk LTE router into it when it is not in my backpack. If speedify fails, it falls over automatically.

If you're trying to get internet in a van in rural Australia, the chances of Speedify going down are completely insignificant compared to more basic things like not having phone signal.

Yes:

1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2020-05-01/rural-residents...

2. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/05/telstra-sms-over-wifi-lau...

3. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/experts-call-for-rethink-of-c...

I’ve looked at Speedify. In fact, I signed up for service with them on my iPad and iPhone as soon as I heard about their service years ago. It doesn’t really get you any higher speed (at least, not on download), what it gets you is a more robust network connection with failover if the primary goes down, although I do see a speed improvement for upload.

On the software-only router side of the house, Speedify at least let’s you tie your multiple links together and get you a more reliable connection. But true aggregation (like LACP) requires that all links be of exactly the same speed — e.g., you do link aggregation on multiple Ethernet ports that are connected to the same switch, and while no one connection will have bandwidth greater than a single Ethernet port, you will have be able to have multiple connections that can all achieve that same level of speed. Their style of bonding isn’t the same thing.

I’ve also looked at OpenMPTCPRouter. On paper, it looks like a better solution to me than Speedify, but in practice it’s not designed to handle multiple different upstream connections with varying levels of performance. I’ve chatted with the author, who lives in France and his ISP connection is 1.25 gigabits per second, so this hasn’t been a priority. He did say that this was going to be something he was going to start working on soon, however.

So, I might be forced to go with something like a six port Protectli pfSense or OPNSense router plus Speedify, at least until I can get something better.

Oh, and Speedify has (or had, maybe they’ve changed this), an effective speed limit that they also implement. I think it’s about 200 mbps. If you’re getting that speed or better over Wi-Fi or Ethernet or whatever your primary network provider is, then they don’t even bother to bring up the other providers.

So, you’re not going to tie multiple upstream sub-1gbps providers together into one giant network connection, because Speedify will just stop bringing up more channels when it thinks you have enough speed.

At least, that was the Behaviour I saw when I was doing my tests. Maybe I had the wrong type of account, so that they were effectively throttling me down?

Hmm. Okay, I did some more testing tonight, and it looks like they do now have more connection modes, including one optimized for streaming, one optimized for raw speed, and one optimized for reliability.

I was able to get some higher speeds with Speedify than I could get with my naked ISP or with NordVPN, and the graphs showed that the cellular 4G connection was actually a significant bonus on top of my DSL.

So, now I guess I’m going to have to build my own Speedify router combined with OPNSense or pfSense, and get those other upstream network connections also set up.

I've dreamt of redundant/automatic failover connections since mid 90s.

Whatever solution I researched it boiled down to trading bandwith increase for latency increase.

Speedify seems intriguing yet seems extremely country dependant.

Say you are in Sweden and want to access Australian site when Speedify server is in UK your latency is surely to go up.

Since Speedify is essentially a VPN with multiple incoming connections, isn't it extremely important on what country Speedify servers are?

PS Another up/downside your public IP is probably Speedify IP (just like a regular VPN)

Apart from the SPOF, speedify introduces additional latency because you have to bounce through their servers.

Most of the time you can simply route traffic through multiple uplinks without bonding.

It adds a tiny amount of latency, but there are more important factors than latency.

If you are on a Zoom call, tunneling through Speedify in redundant mode will give you the minimum latency of n connections, reduce jitter (latency deviation), and eliminate packet loss.

Having a single point of failure here might be OK, if Speedify is so much more reliable than the other solutions (4G wireless in potentially remote areas). Though yeah, I'd like to see an option to failover to a single provider, because it's conceptually so easy to add.

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