Building a resilient Work from Home network!

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In last one year we have all battled the largest pandemic ever witnessed by the human race.

One positive outcome of this pandemic is Work from Home culture.  Not only do we know it works, but we also have KPIs and Matrices to prove that it is productive.

The organizations around the world are talking about implementing some form of work from home strategy.

The question is, Is your home ready for the future of work?

Today in this blog I will cover a Home network that provides low-cost resilient Internet access

High Level Network Design

Investments

Looking at the above diagram you might be thinking what should I buy to implement!  

To implement the above network we need following devices  

  1. FTH Modem
  2. ADSL Modem
  3. 4g/5g Modem
  4. WAN Load Balancer
  5. Wifi Router

When you subscribe for  a ADSL or FTH (Fibre to Home) Internet connection the devices 1 and 2 are covered by the ISP.  Nothing to buy here.

If you are using Wifi, you already own a Wifi Router.

Therefore, the list of items to buy reduces to 2 items

  1. 4g/5g Modem, below are some recommendations
  2. WAN Load Balancer, There are limited options when it comes to a WAN load Balancer. This choice is also a based on the Speed of the WAN connection

My Setup:

I have a similar network at home,  the hardware I use is as under

  1. 4g/5g Modem: TP-Link TL-MR100
  2. WAN Load Balancer: Tp-Link-TL-ER5120
  3. Wifi Router: Nighthawk X8 R8500 (AC 5300)

ISPs:

  • ACT 300 Mbits/Sec
  • Airtel ADSL  25 Mbits/Sec + Landline Phone
  • 3g/4G JIO 25 Mbits/Sec to 40 Mbits/Sec

Does bandwidth aggregation works?

The next question that comes to the mind is, Does bandwidth aggregation works?

The answer to this question is Yes and No!.

Yes, For a multi session workload/Download it does.

No, For single session workload it does not.

Below is the speed I get for a multi session download. As you can see it is close to 432 Mbits/Sec .

This speed is with my Kid watching 4k content on Netflix.

Stay tuned for installation and configuration

4 comments

  1. good one Sir, the Nighthawk is indeed a badass router.
    just one query – where will you advice to place a vmware proprietary sd-wan device in the above topology?

    1. VMware SD-Wan is for Enterprise users. You may replace “WAN Load Balancer” with “SD-Wan” Edge device. But to do so, you need a working control plane. Hence, this will be huge waste of capabilities and Money for a Home user.
      It will be like buying “SSC Tuatara” and keeping it parked in a garage. You will neither have access to a track nor a road to put all that power to use.

      1. thank you so much… this is helpful, SD-WAN out from the list 🙂
        waiting eagerly for your next blog on installation and configuration… keep it up Sir

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