I renewed my HomeHub+ contract with StarHub and was provided a good deal over my existing 1Gbps HomeHub subscription with Free Netflix Premium & Disney+ with an increased bandwidth of additional 1Gbps (1+1G) and a free Linksys Velop MX4200. It was a no brainer and I went with the deal.
Contract renewal was a straight forward process and the appointment was set 2 days later for the delivery of the Linksys MX4200. Port 3 on my ONT was enabled for the additional 1Gbps access and the existing Port 1 and Tel 1 lines were left as they were.
StarHub’s recommended configuration was as below:
I decided to use my existing Asus ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 instead of the given single unit of Linksys Velop MX4200. I had 3 choices to go with
- WAN Aggregation
- Dual WAN – Load Balancer
- Dual WAN – Fail Over / Fail Back
WAN Aggregation (802.3ad) is not supported by most of the ISP’s in Singapore and I’m left with only the Load Balancer or Fail Over / Fail Back options. In order to maximize the usage of bandwidth available, I decided to go with Dual WAN – Load Balancer configuration.
I had my Port 1 from ONT already connected to my 1G WAN port on the Asus router. With Port 3 on my ONT now enabled, I connected that to the 2.5G WAN port on my router and enabled that as Secondary WAN under Dual WAN configuration page. With that, the Dual WAN Mode was set to Load Balance with Routing rules enabled for Dual WAN. If you’re with a Single WAN Port, Asus firmware allows you to configure one of your LAN ports as Secondary WAN port.
The idea was to get my Home Office traffic routed through the Primary WAN and move all the streaming and IoT devices to the secondary WAN. I left the Load Balance Configuration at 3 : 1 as 1 : 1 will be fairly aggressive and with the given bandwidth of 1G on each WAN port, I’ll never have to use these Load Balancing logic and rather go with the static routing rules. This can be easily achieved with the routing rules (though you can create only 32 rules)
The addition of new rule is fairly straight forward with defining either the Source IP Address or IP Address/Netmask or All and then the Destination IP (usually All) and choosing the WAN Unit either Primary WAN or Secondary.
On a second thought, the UI / UX team in Asus could have made this easier by creating a device list menu just like the one on Network Map page and enable an option to define the WAN Unit. This would make it a lot more easier for newbies and advanced users alike.
I made a sample Routing Rules like below:
With most of the bandwidth intensive devices / appliances / hosts part of the routing rules, the rest of them were left to be balanced automatically by the Load Balance configuration which is set at 3 : 1.
This way, I could use a single router and effectively balance all the load through 2 x WAN ports.