Load balancing with multiple UNIFI accounts

Load balancing with multiple UNIFI accounts:

TP-Link TL-SL2218WEB can be configured to support multiple UNIFI accounts over a single LAN network environment.

UNIFI high speed broadband has fast became a common install in most homes and offices across Malaysia today. Except for its pricey bandwidth costs, the sign-up rate for UNIFI would have been significantly higher, as affordability is always the determinant factor whenever a broadband user decides to switch to high speed broadband or not.

thePCHARBOR.com has dealt with numerous installs with our simple, effective but yet affordable router replacement solutions, mainly made up from the relatively cheap TP-Link products. Many UNIFI subscribers have benefited from our pre-configured packages and by buying direct from our techSTORE, powerful router replacement products are shipped straight to the door, unpacked and wired up for instant usage. Simple as that.

In respond to customers’ demands, we have now designed and tested equipment with load-balancing features to support multiple UNIFI HSBB accounts to be deployed in single LAN networks.

Load-balancing is useful for power-users or networks where there are dozens of users accessing the UNIFI HSBB broadband service concurrently. 20Mbps or the VIP20 (or BIZ20) package may be overkill speeds for many of us, but there are pockets of small offices and corporate companies in Malaysia where bandwidth consumption far exceeds the highest available speed package offered by TM UNIFI.

Signing up for 2 or more accounts is the easy part but to configure and set up all incoming lines into a single LAN environment is the real challenge. And we have come this far to prove that even with simple solutions from TP-Link alone, we could rise up to the challenge and bridge heavy users seamlessly back to multiple UNIFI accounts, in fact pretty easily.

Sample load balancing solution with 4 UNIFI HSBB broadband accounts (click on image to reveal bigger detail).

The attached diagram above is a sample network of a group network having 4 UNIFI accounts, one single LAN network and wireless access distributed from 3 dedicated access points.

For this post, we are making a few assumptions; that the 4 UNIFI broadband accounts/services are piped to the premises via FTTH network (fiber-to-the-home) using UNIFI fiber BTU converters, have a single LAN network with 4 VOIP phone lines and 4 IPTV set ups as well. If you are considering from the perspective of an office environment, you can skip the IPTV part.

TM UNIFI’s FTTH pipe is capable of transit bandwidth of at least 100Mbps up and down, and therefore theoretically a single fiber BTU converter is capable of handling of 4 UNIFI accounts without compromising on access speed.

If your UNIFI broadband is installed in a multi-tenant high rise building where 52Mbps vDSL modems are deployed, the maximum number of 20Mbps accounts that can be load-balanced from a single VLAN switch is only two, bearing in mind that a combined two 20Mbps accounts is well within the handling of a single 52Mbps vDSL modem. Should 4 lines be necessary, at least 2 separate VLAN switches will be required because identical tags cannot be established over different VLAN segments in a single smart switch.

A TP-Link TL-SL2218WEB VLAN smart switch is used to established VLAN tunneling back to TM UNIFI’s gateway. In our design, we are piping all 4 PPPoE routing paths back to TM UNIFI’s gateway via only one fiber BTU converter and leaving the other 3 BTUs primarily to power up the VOIP phones alone.

Having sorted out the VLAN stage, next we deployed a powerful TP-Link TL-R480T+ load balancing wired router to take care of routing or masquerading. The TL-T480T+ is a flexible device and can be configured to accept from 1 to 4 WAN inputs, supporting multiple PPPoE dial ups concurrently. Firewall and port mapping shall be handled by this box as well and you can even create a highly scalable cloud environment from inside UNIFI networks, as long as you have the relevant public IP addresses allocated to you by TM UNIFI.

At its output stage the TL-R480T+ is a 100Mbps capable switching LAN port, well within the capacity to take on the combined load of 80Mbps from 4 UNIFI accounts. So with a single Ethernet output, the rest is up to your own imagination on what you want to follow through, designed and implemented in your network,.

Typically, we would use one or more 24 port Gigabit switches (TP-Link TL-SF1024D) and 3 wireless N access points (TP-Link TL-WA901ND) for seamless wireless access from a floor plan as big as 5,000 square feet or slightly more.

Of course, the TP-Link TL-R480T+ could be replaced with other more powerful routing solutions from big names like Vyatta or CISCO, as long as the core VLAN switching is done correctly to establish the tunnel back to UNIFI’s virtual LAN network, any router with PPPoE dialing capability can be used.

One note though, the TL-R480T+ wired router is a load-balancing solution and not a load-combining solution. This means when a particular UNIFI account reaches its allowed peak bandwidth access, any subsequent requests shall be thrown to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th lines accordingly. Load balancing does not give a combined reading of 80Mbps (20Mbps x 4) from a single connection but rather the combined network bandwidth consumption shall equate to 20Mbps + 20Mbps + 20Mbps + 20Mbps.

Check out our techSTORE soon as we will soon be stocking pre-configured UNIFI router replacement packages for load-balancing and multiple accounts support.