I have searched the forum and don't believe this question has been asked, but apologies if I missed something.

I have configured session based load balancing between my two WAN connections, WAN1 a slow but unlimited connection and WAN2 a far faster 4G connection, but with a 40gb/month data limit. I am impressed with the speed gains, but concerned that the router will prefer the faster connection and eat my WAN2 data allowance. The primary reason for WAN2 is backup to unreliable rural ADSL, so I would prefer it not to chew through my allowance in a week.

It isn't totally clear to me how the aggregation functions; is there a way to ensure that it is "data limit aware"? If not, I will return to my prior config...

Thanks...

Irrespective of the quantity of responses (which I assume simply means that it was a stupid question), I thought I would note here that what I suspected might happen, happened....the 2860 'load balanced' me out of data on my 4g connection. Fortunately this has happened only a day or two before the rollover so the impact is minimal.

It did, however, cause issues with my general internet connectivity which was down this morning, despite everything appearing fine on the 2860. It was only when I discovered that my remaining data allowance was zero and turned off WAN2 (in fact I set it to failover only) that everything came back to life.

So generally, unless I am missing something, this functionality needs some work to be truly useful or indeed to work at all under certain circumstances.

Any observations would, once again, be most welcome...

I don't think it was a stupid question, just that I don't have the answers. I use a 4G connection with a 10GB limit as a WAN2 failover. I don't use it for load balancing a) because it would quickly get through the 10GB and b) because every time the router is rebooted it loses the WAN2 Budget figure and re-sets it to 0, so I lose track of how much of the 10GB I've actually used.

Thanks for getting back.

I hadn't noticed it resetting the WAN budget allowance, mainly because I didn't reboot the router this month, but if that is the case then it is truly useless functionality.

I did look into the load balancing/failover functionality in a little more detail and it seems it goes some way towards what I would like to achieve, but in a really confusing and contradictory manner. It seems it allows for failover on "Traffic Threshold", although the figures for that threshold make no reference to the WAN budget, requiring selection from an arbitrary list of usage amounts or a manual rekeying of, logically, the same number you put in the (useless) budget figure. Furthermore, when an interface is configured to be a failover interface it is inactive until it is needed, which isn't what I (or you) would like.

It seems the developers having been thinking in a joined up way here. A lot of people have sim-card based 'backup' connections, every one of which (in the UK at least) have a data limit. It seems perfectly logical for the load balancing to be aware of that limit and to use the limit to load balance in a proportional way....

And, ffs, store the budget and the usage in RAM so that it doesn't get nixed on reboot...

Just to add to this as a footnote, my WAN budget usage amount does not reset to 0 after a reboot. I am on firmware 3.8.8, in case that is a factor.

That's interesting, I'm on 3.8.9.1 but it has always reset with previous firmwares as well.

Edit - I now see that it is not resetting the budget on a simple reboot, so at least one problem seems to have been sorted