Does "load balancing" mean it combines the bandwidth?

[PhotoJoseph]

Hey there. I've been reading up on Load Balancing (in relation to my MX64) and one thing I don't quite get — when it talks about "Traffic will be spread across both uplinks…" does that mean that you are getting combined bandwidth for a single use; i.e. a single file uploaded over two 20Mbit connections will now upload at 40Mbit speeds, or does it just mean that it alternates, sometimes using one connection and sometimes using the other, but never actually getting you faster bandwidth? 

I regularly upload multi gigabyte files and increasing my upload speed could well be worth getting a second connection from another ISP!

[cmr · Accepted solution]

@PhotoJoseph they are additional, so if you had two 50Mb connections you could transfer data at 100Mb.  Bear in mind that the total device throughput is 250Mb.

[PhotoJoseph]

Thanks for that. Of course as you've already responded to my other message, you know how unhappy that 250max is going to make me… *sigh*

Cheers

-Joseph 

[cmr]

Yes, the Merakis are really aimed more at commercial uncontended connections where you'd often buy 200Mb out of a 1Gb tail for say VPN traffic and another 300Mb for Internet traffic and put different devices on each port of the prociders edge equipment. 

A case in point being one of our venues where the SD-WAN MXs are given 200Mb of one connection and 30Mb of another with the Internet MX using 70Mb of one and 100Mb of the other.

We therefore have 400Mb in use but not all through a single device.

[PhotoJoseph]

Got it. I love the idea of combining to get more, but being limited to 250 is a total deal breaker. 

I'm crying over here. This sucks. *sniff*