Load balancing and redundant Internet connection using TP-Link ER6020

3 min readMar 17, 2020

Overview

I started my homelab journey in 2017 setting up small server to host my files and test my web applications. Today, I am giving my small network a bit of an upgrade by having a redundant Internet connection using a TP-Link ER6020. I appreciate that TP-Link made it affordable for us to buy business class (SME) network appliance. If you are living in Kuala Lumpur and want to buy TP-Link business network devices. Go to Sri computers in Lowyat plaza they enterprise network devices mostly in stock.

TP-Link ER6020 Details

Base on the datasheet, the ER6020 v2.0 has 1 Gigabit WAN port, 3 Gigabit LAN/WAN ports and 1 Gigabit LAN port. It can handle 40K concurrent sessions with a NAT throughput of 940Mbps. There are other business class network routers out there that supports higher throughput but for my requirement this is enough. This router comes with rack-mount kit and has a good build quality.

Web Management Interface

You can only configure TP-Link ER6020 using the web management interface, sorry die-hard console fans. This router has intelligent load balance, and link backup (failover). In its management interface you can add static and policy based routing as well.

Once you have both WAN1 and WAN2 running we can then proceed with configuring the Load Balancing. In a nutshell the following options (checkbox are as follow):

Enable Load Balancing — The load balancing will be enabled assuming that you have multiple WAN configured
Enable Application Optimized Routing — Enabled this if you want a specific traffic to use the same WAN port when it started a TCP/IP session. This is very useful in banking website because load balancing tends to switch packets on different WAN ports hence load balancing.
Enable Bandwidth Based Balance Routing on port(s) — Enable this port if you want the router to utilized your WAN port traffic usage. Note that you have to specify the bandwidth of each WAN port for this to work.