Combining 8 ISPs with a single mikrotik device

Hello all, this time, we would like to share our project of combining 8 ISPs with a single Mikrotik device. So, our client already subscribes to internet connections from 8 different ISPs, and want to use them to provide internet connections to his customers. The reasons are simple:

1. For availability purposes. If one connection is down, the customer is still able to connect via other links (there are eight connections in total, you know that, right? :-p)
2. To increase capacity and also sharing traffic load among the connections. These mean let say if each link has a 100 Mbps datarate, having 8 of them will result in 800 Mbps in total. Sounds good, right?

so this is what we did:

1. configure ONU modems to be in the bridge-mode. The upstream connections are using GPON technology and luckily are allowed to access their modem. We already wrote an article on how to configure bridge-mode on your ONU modem.
2. Configure Mikrotik to do PPPOE dial. see picture below for the result:
   
   
3. Setup NAT on each exit interface (in this case, the PPPoE interfaces)
4. configure a specific static route for every upstream connection, apart from the main routing table. You can use a routing-mark parameter for this purpose
   
   
5. finally, setting up a firewall mange rule that puts a routing-mark on every packet that is coming to the router at the inbound interface. Because this process needs to be done before the router reads the routing table, it is mandatory to use the prerouting chain on your firewall mangle.
6. monitor the connection
   
   

How to distinguish which ISP will be forwarded for each customer? Its a good question. there are several ways to do that:

1. Use static allocation. So you can create an address-list that contains a list of IP addresses that will be forwarded via link X. in this case, you will have eight address-list for each upstream connection.
2. Use dynamic allocation, with PCC (Per-Connection-Classifier) parameter. In this case, you may create eight rules where each of them will point to a dedicated connection.

That’s all. Thank you for reading.

FYI, this topic has also been discussed at GLCNetworks Training. If you are interested, please contact us here, WhatsApp available.