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ADSL Bandwidth Aggregation w/ Multiple Accounts?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-those-who-need-more-bandwidth dept.

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?"

2 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. What exactly do you want? by photon317 · · Score: 5, Informative


    Inverse Multiplexing would happen at the dsl modem level, not at the ip level. It would require inverse multiplex support at your provider's DSLAM, and you would probably be using multiple lines under a single account.

    IMHO the best way for a residential consumer to get more bandwidth (and reliability) is to multi-NAT your home network. Sign up for a couple of DSL lines (maybe pretend to be stupid enough that you want a second DSL for another room in the house or something) and perhaps a Cable Modem hokoup for redundancy and a bit more bandwidth.

    Into the ethernet jacks of each of the 3 or so modems, plug a direct crossover cable to seperate ethernet ports on your NAT/Firewall/Router box. A Sun Ultra 5 running OpenBSD with a quad fast ethernet card would work great.

    Have your NAT box run three dhcp client instances to get IPs on all three interfaces, and have it run NAT for a private network on the back.

    The last remaining part of the puzzle is having the gateway loadbalance the three available default routes per connection stream, either round-robin or by utilization.

    Hopefully someone will reply with a pre-shink-wrapped answer to that part, and preferably on OpenBSD since I already mentioned it, but I guess ultrapenguin could work too :)

    --
    11*43+456^2
  2. Outgoing easier than incoming by crow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.