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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?"
I moved to a place where almost nobody (probably no one at all) has a cable modem. I didn't do this to get more bandwidth, rather, it was a rather pleasant side effect. I went from inconsistent high speeds to a constantly fast connection. It's like having my own T-1 line without all the equipment.
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
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).
Well my friend, think of a worst case scenario, you live in outback Australia and your lightning fast 56K barely reaches 28.8, that's when billy bob down the road hasn't tractored over the phone line or town fiber link, or your modem hasn't been hit by lightning for like the eigth time :) Still think your DSL/Cable connection bites?
In theory, this should give me a faster connection, that should withstand an outage of one of the two ISPs.
All I've done towards trying this out has been to get both a cable modem and a DSL connection. Right now, I have two NAT firewalls set up, and I have different boxes configured to use one or the other as the default route.
Even with a crude system like this for splitting the load over the connections, it still has been worth it to be able to run two scps at once when I have to upload a couple of hundred megs to my remote box.
Don't uncap your cable modem! (It's a federal offence!)
=Smidge=
Bridging is the process of connecting two networks to each other transparently. What you are talking avout is teaming. It is taking two NICs and "joining" them together to provide double the bandwidth. This is achieved by having a switch that supports teaming and adapters that support this, usually have to be the same.
Move to Sweden. Get 10 megabit full duplex, uncapped, for $35/month.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It's also about staying connected.
I've been using @home (now Shaw) in Vancouver for about 5 years. The last 2 years, I've also had ADSL. They are both business packages, but Shaw couldn't offer any kind of uptime guarantee.
In my area cable is twice as fast as DSL, but Shaw enforces download limits strictly, whereas Telus (phone co.) doesn't... at all. This is important to me for both my business and my personal usage/surfing habits.
When you're supporting clients remotely, telling them that you can't do much (or anything) for them because your connection is down doesn't cut it. When you're in the middle of a remote backup, VNC or SSH session adminning a client's box and all of a sudden everything stops, they don't care. They want the job done.
As fast as the cable is, it is also down more frequently than DSL. Here anyway. So I let my wife and kid run their boxes off it while I run primarily off DSL, switch or sharing as the need arises.
For what it's worth, I run 2 seperate trimmed down linux boxen as router/firewalls with SSH tunneling VNC for remote admin when I'm out, as well as NATing to internal boxes for web and mail services.
Box A: Cable: 2 NICs, 1 in, 1 out.
Box B: DSL: 3 NICs, 1 in, 1 out DSL, 1 out to 2nd Cable IP.
Dlink 10/100 24port Switch in the middle.
Since neither Shaw nor Telus have dropped simultaneously, I haven't been down in close to 2 years.
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
Could some one please tell me why you need multiple broadband connections? Some of us would be happy with one.