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Multiple Broadband Connections at Home?

Posted by Cliff on from the hardware-bonding-solutions dept.

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?"

3 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Won't work as some people might expect by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

  2. I was thinking about this by Pathwalker · · Score: 4, Informative
    When I noticed that the FreBSD user mode ppp package supports both PPP over TCP/IP and multilink, the following idea popped into my head:

    • Get two broadband conenctions
    • Get a firewall box (Fred) with three ethernet cards
    • Acquire 3 ip addresses (A, B, C) on a co-located box (Carl)
    • Hook the two ISP connections to Fred.A and Fred.B configure Fred.A as the route for Carl.A, and Fred.B as the route for Carl.B.
    • Hook Fred.C to the lan
    • run multilink PPP over TCP/IP between Fred and Carl, with Carl.C as the assigned IP address. Use that as the default route for the LAN, with NAT to map internal IP addresses onto Carl.C.


    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.
    1. Re:I was thinking about this by droyad · · Score: 5, Informative

      Good idea, wrong technology

      Multi-link PPP must be configured on both sides of the connection, you can't have Multi-link PPP to share a connection to two different ISPs.

      Would would work is having a multi-homed host with 1 connection to the LAN and two to the internet. The NAT firewall would have to be configured with 2 external IP addresses and be programmed to load ballance.

      Remember you will have 2 global IP addresses. This means that if you only have one connection open, only one of the links can be ever used. This is because of the way TCP works, it uses the global IP address to identify a connection. So it would not be possible to download a large file over both connections sumiltaniously.