@bjaffe:
You have a firewall rule above your load balancing rule (Default LAN to Any ipv4) that's taking precedence on all of your LAN net generated traffic and using the default gateway. PfSense will process the rule set from top down. Move the LAN net to any rule below the one you have configured with the specified GW group.
That did it! Thank you! Completely overlooked the firewall priority law. I changed the "default Lan to any rule" to the gateway LB and killed my own created rule. The two WANs now appear to be load-balancing but not as effectively or efficiently as I would like them to. Each WAN on its own could give me 25-27Mb/s bandwidth (speedtest.com), combined I don't get anything above 15-17Mb/s. I have been tweaking around with the weight ratio (though both have the same speed and are from the same ISP). Aside from using speedtest, I thought downloading a large file via IDM could be a better venue for testing the actual bandwidth speed, but IDM appears to be using only the default gateway (for instance I set the IDM to use 8 connections, and set the weight ratio to 4-4 on pfsense, but IDM is only talking through the default gateway, while the second gateway is idle with no traffic activity). On some youtube videos I have seen people easily aggregating the two bandwidth (illustrated as before and after on speedtest), but so far my attempts have been semi-fruitful (if that's even a word). I will try to research more on this matter on my own, but as always any help that could save me time, frustration, and energy, would be greatly appreciated!
Also, you can't use the ping or traceroute tools inside of pfSense to test your load balance configuration because it's considered firewall generated traffic. The rule you configured for specifying your load balancing GW group won't apply when the traffic is generated using those tools on pfSense. It will only apply to "inbound" traffic to that specified interface (LAN). Also, multi-WAN load balancing entails individual connections being balanced in a round-robin fashion, so traceroute wouldn't be the best test here. Try running a speed-test and then checking the traffic graph in pfSense looking at both WANs and making sure activity is taking place on them.
I did not know that. Thank you for clarifying the matter for me.
UPDATE: So, I tested load balancing only with the two DSL lines, and now it appears to be I'm getting the aggregated bandwidth of 15 Mb/s (7Mb/s from DSL A + 8Mb/s through DSL B). Another thing that is a bit puzzling with regards to the TD-LTE lines is that when I start downloading a file one of the two connections' RTT begins to hike up very rapidly (from 130ms to 650ms where offline state is triggered) while the other one remains pretty stable. ??? Also at all times the two connections seem to have about 60 to 70ms RTT difference!
