I was wondering is it possible to use both my wired and wireless connection at the same time to increase bandwidth. For example using my ethernet card to connect to my router then use my wireless card to connect to my girlfriend's router next door. Hell while we are at it, in theory could you use a mimo wireless card to connect to multiple wireless networks. Thanks in advance

11/7/2006 12:32:26 PM

Yeah you could bridge them, but it probably wouldn't really be worth the effort.

11/7/2006 12:33:56 PM

Aight after looking through google and finding now answers. What are the actually pros and cons of bridging the 2 cards? thanks for the help

11/7/2006 2:08:25 PM

you'd need something like http://www.pfsense.com with some sort of load balancing capabilities.

i've been trying to bond/balance two Motorolla Canopy subscriber modules for a week now, ((each has a hardware limitation of 4mbit, both connected to a 15mbit fiber backbone)) but the trouble you go through if they're on the same subnet or have the same ip range isn't worth the hassle. I don't know that much about networking but simple "bridging" your two NIC's re: windows won't give you jack shit really.

Ultimately what you'd have to do if you chose PFsense...both modems would be NAT'd and have different IP schemes, i haven't fooled around with it much more than a couple hours, and our network at the office is weird so i never got it fixed....here's a mini tutorial http://wiki.pfsense.com/wikka.php?wakka=OutgoingLoadBalancing&show_comments=1 http://www.netlife.co.za/content/view/34/34/

This ASCII diagram will probably come out all fucked up, and even more so if I didn't draw it up in the most feasible way of doing it. I'm sure someone can add to it or correct me. Three NIC's WAN1 WAN2 and your LAN nic. Or you could eliminated the basic switch before your two respective WAP routers and use 4 network cards in your pfsense box, WAN1/2 and LAN1/2.

Your Cable Modem.................................................Girlfriends Cable Modem
........|.......................................................................................|
........|========[WAN1]=========PFSENSE BOX===[WAN2]=======|
.........................................................|
......................................................[LAN]
.........................................................|
................................................[Cheap Switch]
..............................................|................|
..............................................|................|
................................[Your Apt's WAP]....[Her Apt's WAP]
.....................................|........|...|...........|....|.....|
................................room 1....2....3........rm 1...2....3

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

or buy one of these

Nexland Pro's I think Symantec? bought them out, plenty of dual WAN stand alone routers on the market.


http://cgi.ebay.com/Nexland-ISB-PRO-800-8-PORTS-TURBO-ROUTER-MINT-COND_W0QQitemZ160048536159QQihZ006QQcategoryZ3706QQcmdZViewItem


hope some of that helped....

[Edited on November 8, 2006 at 5:56 AM. Reason : .]

11/8/2006 5:42:46 AM

^ if you get something like that setup, you won't be able to use the full 2 Internet connections in one download. It will only let you have individual tcp connections going through different providers.

11/8/2006 8:41:58 PM

sounds like a neat idea but i dont know the feasability

but i would think since wired is faster than wireless you might get some faster bandwidth with 2 10/100/1000 cards in your PC with each one tied into a different broadband connection but i dunno

11/8/2006 8:59:57 PM

The wired being faster than wireless thing is meaningless when residential broadband is slower than either.

11/8/2006 9:05:54 PM

^^^ i was thinking along the lines of something like newsleecher or flashget/download accelerator where there would be near 10 seeds downloading at once. Wouldn't that be possible?

11/8/2006 9:09:52 PM

^^probably as far as speed

but wired is certainly >>>>>>>> wireless when it comes to packets lost and signal fluctuations

11/8/2006 9:24:37 PM

I might be wrong here but I'm pretty sure you'll run into issues doing what you are especially with requests to websites and passing of form data. I don't know how servers respond to requests but since it's from 2 seperate IPs... isn't that a problem as far as confusing the webserver your speaking with?

/shrugs

11/8/2006 10:43:08 PM

you're talking about using MLPPP (multilink PPP.. aka shotgunning back in the dialup days)

shotgunning connections to do what you want to do won't work.. most single web requests will be sent over one connection.. the idea behind applications such as PFSENSE is to take the packet load and split across multiple connections..

the only thing two connections would do is allow you two download lets say 2 files at full bandwidth of one connection each instead of 1 file at 2xbandwidth of one connection. (so 2 @ 1.5mbps each vs 1 @ 3mbps)

IN THE FAQ:

Quote :

"Load balancing is on per connection basis, not a bandwidth basis. All packets in a given flow will go over only one link."

if you want more bandwidth, get a faster connection.. if you have roadrunner, get roadrunner turbo.. if your bandwidth problem is a roommate thing, then look at using QoS to limit bandwidth usage

[Edited on November 9, 2006 at 2:26 AM. Reason : ]

11/9/2006 2:13:39 AM

^but if you're using an application such as newsleecher that allows 10 concurrent seeds/connections wouldn't you see the benefits ?

11/9/2006 3:16:59 AM

^^ that is NOT MLPPP. You are an idiot.

11/9/2006 12:22:02 PM

Quote :

"I was wondering is it possible to use both my wired and wireless connection at the same time to increase bandwidth. "

no

[Edited on November 9, 2006 at 1:09 PM. Reason : should have just quoted that bit]

11/9/2006 12:46:00 PM

^^this definitely has NOTHING to do with MLPPP.

^ You CAN use both a wired and wireless card at the same time. But AFAIK, there's no native support in any mainline OSs for load balancing multiple network connections on disparate networks. Bridging two NICs isn't the same thing as using the bandwidth of multiple ISP connections.

As said by others, each flow must use the same egress interface to work, and the idea is that you load balance multiple flows across each NIC. I don't know if any consumer grade software exists to facilitate that, but it can certainly be done in theory.

11/9/2006 12:51:05 PM

Quote :

"^^ that is NOT MLPPP. You are an idiot."

+1

[Edited on November 9, 2006 at 1:06 PM. Reason : .]

11/9/2006 12:52:21 PM

you're right about MLPPP.. It's actually one of the options that can achieve what coolio wants if the connection supports that kind of protocol. not what you guys are talking about. it was late.. not that familiar with the protocol anyway.

if you want double the bandwidth with the benefits of faster speeds (such as downloading an image faster of a website) then you need to bond your connection using multiple links with some routing protocol that supports bonding. This needs to be done at the ISP end as well..

using two connections on different accounts (you and your g/f's) I highly doubt the ISP will agree to bond the connections, and who knows what problems you would cause since your g/f wouldn't have a bonded connection on her end.

You will likely only be able to achieve bandwidth aggregation which will result in what I said before.. download multiple things at 1-link speed instead of 1 thing at multi-link speeds. Each TCP connection would be sent over 1 link (PFSENSE would be the application that would tell it which link to send it over to balance the loads).. so yes Grandmaster.. concurrent connections would see benefits.. you would be able to download more images on a website in the same amount of time.. but the single image would still take the same amount of time to download since the packets would be sent over the connection that made the HTTP request.

[Edited on November 9, 2006 at 1:20 PM. Reason : ]

11/9/2006 1:19:21 PM

Quote :

"you're right about MLPPP.. It's actually one of the options that can achieve what coolio wants if the connection supports that kind of protocol."

That is not how MLPPP works. MLPPP requires that all links in the bundle be physically connected to the same peer devices. You may want to read RFC1990.

Quote :

"if you want double the bandwidth with the benefits of faster speeds (such as downloading an image faster of a website) then you need to bond your connection using multiple links with some routing protocol that supports bonding"

It sounds like you're talking about NIC bundling, or 802.3ad, but you only have a partial understanding of how it works. First off, it should be obvious that this is not relevant to the question the original poster is asking, and secondly, NIC bundling is a layer 2 concept, so saying "using multiple links with some routing protocol that supports bonding" makes no sense whatsoever.

Quote :

"Each TCP connection would be sent over 1 link "

Quote :

"so yes Grandmaster.. concurrent connections would see benefits.. you would be able to download more images on a website in the same amount of time.."

by the way, the two statements above are contradictory. Each image transfer from server to host is part of the same TCP flow, and thus will use the same egress interface.


This problem is not one of aggregation, but one of load balancing. You CANNOT aggregate the bandwidth of multiple links that are on disparate networks.

11/9/2006 1:55:44 PM

Couldn't you get more performance out of 2 links if the application level protocol supported it?

For example if your bit torrent client downloaded seperate pieces from both links.

11/9/2006 2:00:12 PM

With something like bittorrent yes. IIRC, BT uses a range of L4 Port numbers, so assuming the load balancing scheme used an algorithm based on a hash of source and destination L2/L3/L4 addresses to select which link to use, you could certainly achieve that.

The other downside to such a scheme is that since this would be a software function, there would be an inherent performance hit (may or may not be noticeable) induced by the delay from waiting for a CPU interrupt to process the hash.

Not really applicable, but in the router world this is done automatically when there are multiple routes to a given prefix. Depending on the routing protocol, it will select which route to use based on whatever metric it uses... i.e. hop count (Distance Vector protocols like RIP), or link speed/cost (OSPF). In the case of equal cost paths, it's generally per destination but depending on the router, it may be tunable. However, with your paths spread among multiple ISPs, there would be an extremely slim chance of having the same cost to a given prefix, plus it's not a realistic scenario, since you're not going to be able to peer your routers with your ISPs over residential broadband.

11/9/2006 2:20:42 PM

when i said download more images in the same amount of time.. i didn't mean that images would download faster.. just that more would be downloaded.. yea.. each image transfer would be sent from server to host over the pipe(or interface in your wording) that sent the host to server request with more available bandwidth for each of the TCP connections established..

maybe i'm just confused on what coolio is trying to accomplish.. my initial thought is he wants more 'speed' which he won't be able to do in the setup he's talking about.. then i figured maybe he has roommates that are hogging bandwidth so he wants to use available bandwidth on his connection and some on his g/f's. if his bandwidth usage is low and just wants a nice fast connection without other's torrents affecting it then he should look into QoS.

If he just wants more bandwidth to torrent or do whatever he needs to do with lots of bandwidth, then he's probably better off getting a higher bandwidth connection instead of going through the hassle of balancing his bandwidth across two different connections.. I jsut think there's too much of a risk of packet loss and more overhead than needed with consumer-level equipment.

[Edited on November 9, 2006 at 2:32 PM. Reason : ]

11/9/2006 2:32:17 PM

Thanks for all the help guys, its not really that big of a deal. I was just curious to see what options were there.

Quote :

"then i figured maybe he has roommates that are hogging bandwidth so he wants to use available bandwidth on his connection and some on his g/f's."

I appreciate all the info, not interested in doing this much just to get a little more bandwidth. I mainly was hoping windows could do it for me.

11/9/2006 11:47:43 PM