Load Balancing Routers

What is a load balancing router?
A load balancing router is a router which can use more than one Internet connection simultaneously to provide internet access to devices connected to it.

One of the benefits of load balancing is that it allows a network to utilise more bandwidth than a single connection can provide but also it allows a site to gain resilience by relying on more than one network connection and removing a potential single point of failure.

Another benefit of load balancing could be to direct traffic to a different network connection based on the destination that needs to be reached. An example could be one WAN which is connected to a private network and another WAN which connects to the public internet.

The best load balancing routers will give flexibility on the load balancing rules which they can be configured with and will support multiple different connection types to gain diversity so that it’s unlikely that a network outage affects multiple connections simultaneously. For example if both connections use the same street side cabinet and a lorry knocks it out and takes both offline simultaneously.

A common approach could be to use one connection on FTTC & one on Mobile broadband (4G / LTE), or one FTTC and one FTTP so that the internet load balancing router is using different types of connection that are unlikely to be simultaneous affected by the same network outage.

For more information see our What is Load Balancing? article explaining load balancing in more detail.

 DSL WANEthernet WANIntegrated 4G/LTEFirewall Mb/sIPSec VPN Mb/sWirelessVoIP
Vigor 2832 Vigor 2832  ADSL  tick    300  50    
Vigor 2832n Vigor 2832n  ADSL  tick    300  50  tick
N300		  
Vigor 2865 Vigor 2865 VDSL / ADSL tick   1300 800    
Vigor 2865ac Vigor 2865ac VDSL / ADSL tick   1300 800 tick
AC1300		  
Vigor 2865Lac Vigor 2865Lac VDSL / ADSL tick tick 1300 800 tick
AC1300		  
Vigor 2865Vac Vigor 2865Vac VDSL / ADSL tick   1300 800 tick
AC1300		 tick
Vigor 2866 Vigor 2866 G.fast / VDSL / ADSL tick   1300 800    
Vigor 2866ac Vigor 2866ac G.fast / VDSL / ADSL tick   1300 800 tick
AC1300		  
Vigor 2865ax Vigor 2865ax VDSL / ADSL tick   1300 800 tick
AX3000		  
Vigor 2866Lac Vigor 2866Lac G.fast / VDSL / ADSL tick tick 1300 800 tick
AC1300		  
Vigor 2927 Vigor 2927    2    1800  800    
Vigor 2927ac Vigor 2927ac    2    1800  800  tick
AC1300		  
Vigor 2927ax Vigor 2927ax    2    1800  800  tick
AX3000		  
Vigor 2927Lac Vigor 2927Lac    2  tick  1800  800  tick
AC1300		  
Vigor 2962 Vigor 2962    2    2400  900    
Vigor 3910 Vigor 3910    8    10000  3000    

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