Show HN: SmoothWAN a simple home internet bonding router using Speedify | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SmoothWAN a simple home internet bonding router using Speedify

github.com

52 pointsgoodburb19 comments

I wasn't familiar with Speedify[1]. It looks like a paid VPN service.

A few years ago I lived in an apartment with a complicated bonded WAN setup with the help of some Juniper devices. I was hoping this would be something like a turnkey multipath TCP setup that would run on consumer hardware.

It looks like OpenMPTCProuter[2] has made some progress in this space, if anyone is interested.

[1] https://speedify.com/

[2] https://www.openmptcprouter.com/

Have been using it for 2 years, it's great! But OpenMPTCProuter is aggregation only, no seamless failover or redundant channelling and needs an ISP that doesn't filter TCP headers. There is no quality monitoring system, it takes 1 lossy WAN to degrade total throughput. A cold boot with a master WAN down will disable aggregation. It's difficult to setup but it's useful for specific cases. Checkout the comparison in the README

I couldn't find what you were referring to, but I did note that OpenMPTCRouter is at least partially built upon Glorytun[1] which seems to support failover, so perhaps it is something that OpenMPTCRouter will eventually implement.

[1] https://github.com/angt/glorytun

OMR is using a SOCKS for proxying TCP over MPTCP. Glorytun UDP is a VPN, choosing that in OMR will disable MPTCP and the proxy, although the author seems to have dropped the support for the reasons below.

OMR is currently using a an optimized fork of a very old version of Gtun TCP[1] to tunnel non TCP streams over the bonding proxy. Gtun UDP doesn't reorder packets nor auto adjust weight making it effectively poor when using different links, not an issue if you're using same ISP and equal hardware. QUIC is also blocked due to the large overhead : MPTCP->SOCKS->TCP->UDP<-Client Any UDP service/streaming will perform poorly as a result.

There are few MLVPN forks for non-equal WAN bonding and seamless failover, "UBOND"[2] does not require preset speed for each WAN, nor reorder buffer tweaking.

[1] https://github.com/angt/glorytun/tree/tcp

[2] https://github.com/markfoodyburton/ubond

Never had a good experience with Speedify, never worked as advertised.

I also did not get any benefit from it when I tried it in 2017. Granted it was New Caledonia. The connections are provided by a single state run telecom with no competition. The internet is shit there.

Later, I tried bonding for speed in other countries and it always was slower or the same as one connection.

You are better off with a Peplink device and their SpeedFusion service. At least you can host it yourself in cloud providers and control how much bandwidth it gets.

Edit: I have one of these: https://www.peplinkworks.com/max-transit-duo.asp

Can you share pricing?

Appreciate the link, but half the page is "get a quote"

It depends on which country you live in and what types of WANs you want. Mine has 2 LTE-A WANs as well as ethernet WANs. It cost $1200 NZD which means it could probably be around $600 USD in the USA.

You can find cheaper models if you only have 1 LTE WAN + 1 ethernet WAN.

I also have a Nighthawk M2 which is an LTE "router" with a battery that has an ethernet port. At one point I had that plugged into the ethernet WAN port so I had 3 LTE modems going at the same time. This is obviously beneficial when there are multiple carriers in the area with their own infrastructure.

Oh, I remember you! We've made major changes to the protocol since then. Connections with as much latency and loss as you had cannot be maxxed out by a single TCP connection.

We now default to a mode that uses up to 8 TCP connections in parallel on each internet connection to let us reach the full speed of connections even if they have latency and loss that limits the performance of TCP.

We'd love to get you to try it again. Email us at support@speedify.com and we'd get you a license to reevaluate.

I tested a BL20X, had to tweak the WAN connection buffer size every few days when the speeds change with cellular and landline, the latency would be very high, a constant ~500ms which may not be an issue when streaming video, no issues when using two cellular modems. I also had to set it at 2000 to get the upload speed of the faster WAN. (~2019)

Unfortunately the cheapest models are at least few hundreds $ and reliable dedicated servers aren't cheap.

Switched to Mushroom networks, while the speed was good with pepwave, the latency was unbearable for me.

Shoot us an email at support@speedify.com. If it wasn't recently, there have been a lot of improvements at every level of the software.

I tried it. Worked well enough.

It seems they suffer from a fundamental network quality issue. If I had access to a single network with enough quality, I'd just use it. Every time I've needed Speedify, all of the connection options have been terrible. It can only help so much when you're pooling a hotel sharing 100MB connection and two phones with 1 bar.

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I did find their billing a bit shady. They force you to go to your payment provider to cancel the subscription.

Exactly. My interests on bonding vanished the day I finally got 1GB at home. I keep a second 100MB connection with another provider for failover only, that I can handle without any external service.

I wish this came out 3 weeks ago. I was using this setup on a device by device basis and got so tired of the setup I canceled one of my 2 ISPs and just decided to pay for “unlimited” data. This would have solved my use case perfectly.

Alex from Speedify here. It's not our project but it is exciting that they're putting our software on the router. Happy to answer any questions.

Can speedify deal with intermittent packet loss? (200ms every 10 minutes).

Yes, speedify has a lot of smarts around packet loss. It uses up to 8 TCP connections in parallel to avoid slow downs based on loss.

But for the kind of burst of massive loss you describe, I'd suggest having a secondary connection it can use that during the bursts of loss. A cellular connection could be used just during these times to smooth it out.

Biggest issue I have with speedify if not being able to use my own server... You can get a dedicated box from them, but it's 100$+ per month on top of the standard plan... And it's still managed by them... I already have my own hardware, and if I wanted to use this for business purposes, my legal and security teams would not approve it being managed by others... I have had good results bonding multiple lte connections, but using my own server would make it a lot better...

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