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Multiple Broadband Connections at Home?
Another Web Monkey asks: "I am a typical geek. After working all day on the computer, I come home and get right back on the internet. But unlike my corporate office, I don't have multiple internet connections. I know there are others not happy with a single DSL/Cable connection, but can't afford T1's. Some dual broadband routers are starting to appear on the market. I want to know what others are doing to satisfy, even if temporarily, their cravings for faster connections at home? Has anyone tried these routers, or have another solution?"
Several internet connections can be used to spread the load of different logical connections (two downloads for example), but unless the provider actively supports it, you can't use them to speed up one download. Download managers can help by splitting the file into separately downloadable parts, but it won't be "like one connection". Providers will most likely not support "broadband channel bundling" because they could simply configure the broadband interface to the double speed to achieve the same effect (but they don't).
It seems odd that home users can't do similar things with a unix/linux box that ISP's have been doing for over 5 yrs. Why isn't there an easy way to use BGP or some other gateway protocol to have a unix box set up to use two (or more) connections?? It seems rather odd, cause i have worked with the nexland router and it doesn't line balance, you either have two outbound routes (uses all bandwidth on one then flips to the the next line for other requests) or just works as failover, so that if one line goes down the second one comes up.
The way TCP/IP was built you should be able to route any packet out any of the interfaces at any given time, this would give you the ability to balance load between lines, and the returning data would be coming back thru either of the given lines...
where's the technology to do this??
-b