ADSL Bandwidth Aggregation w/ Multiple Accounts?

kernel_panic writes "Okay, I've been reading up on combining two or more SDSL connections together to give you one big fat pipe, but I haven't seen any references to doing this w/ ADSL. This place even manufactures a nifty little hardware device (ePipe) that combines two WAN ports for the aggregate sum. I've seen the Netopia 7000 Series routers support this capability as well, w/ an add-on card, but all of these places only mention accomplishing this w/ SDSL accounts. I've seen a lot of info on bandwidth load balancing, but I want bandwidth aggregation (inverse multiplexing). Has anyone had any experience doing this kind of thing w/ your Linux/BSD gateway boxen?"

Comments

Outgoing easier than incoming

[crow]

Outgoing packets can be sent out either connection. Unless there's some really paranoid packet filtering going on at your ISP, outgoing packets are routed without any concern for the source IP, so there's no theoretical reason why you can't have 100% load balancing across your connections for outgoing traffic.

Incoming packets are routed by your ISP to a particular IP address. That address is normally tied to a particular physical connection. Hence, you have very little ability to load balance. All hope is not lost, though. If you are load-balancing outgoing connections, then connections that you establish will be randomly distributed between your physical connections, giving an approximate load balancing. For incoming connections, you can use DNS to list multiple IP addresses for your hostname, allowing some load balancing across the connections.

Now the exact software configuration to acheive what is theoretical possible is a good question; I don't know.