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I live in an area without any high speed internet access. Currently I am using a cell phone hotspot connected through a wireless to wired bridge to my home wired/wireless networks (the cell service only allows ONE connection to the hotspot). I would like to increase my bandwidth using multiple cell services/hotspots and have not found any good resources for doing that. I am aware of devices like the TP-Link ER605 that offer multiple WAN/load balancing capabilities, but that's not the entire answer.

What is the best (consumer) solution to load balance WAN traffic? What is the best solution to convert the wireless hotspot to the (typical) wired load balancer?

I'd prefer a few simple 'boxes' over something like building a *nix system with various software and some network adapters, and I'm fine with having to use DD-WRT/OpenWRT if that's necessary.

I realize that StarLink might be the best answer to the overall problem, but it is more costly than multiple cellphones rates currently are.

Bill
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  • Cellphones can usually share internet over USB-C so that might make the cellular connection have one less hop through the hotspot -> bridge if you can just plug the cellphone USB into a router that supports USB internet connections. – Romen Mar 04 '24 at 18:44
  • Also load balancers do not "increase your bandwidth" in an ideal way. If you have one thing trying to use as much bandwidth as possible (like a large file download, game updates, 4K netflix, etc.) then it will only get the bandwidth of the faster connection and not the sum of both connections. Most web servers will not allow multiple public IPs to be part of one TCP/UDP session so your load balancer has to pick just one connection to run any TCP/UDP session on completely. – Romen Mar 04 '24 at 18:46
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    Roman - thanks for suggesting the USB connection. In practice I'm using a dedicated cellphone that's always connected to the charger via a timer (so it's not charging continuously) so that may not work for me, but I'll look into it. Also, I am aware of the limitations of 'load balancing' in this scenario, but it bears pointing out. – Bill Mar 04 '24 at 19:41
  • I'll add to Romen's answer though that multiple internet connections can be used to load-balance multiple clients (if that's something that exists in on your network.) I know you said you'd prefer not to use something *nix-based, but would you consider OPNsense? It's got great support for multi-WAN, including network sharing over USB with a phone, and isn't too hard to set up. – JMY1000 Mar 05 '24 at 01:26
  • JMY1000 - I'll take a look at OPNsense. Perhaps having everything in one place might be a better solution. – Bill Mar 05 '24 at 15:38

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