So I recently decided to move into an area that is pretty lacking for high speed internet. Basically my two options appear to be DSL maxed out at 1.5 Mbps and Clearwire, which also maxes out at 1.5 Mbps. I was wondering what options were for getting something slightly faster. How hard would it be to get both services and tie them together somehow to make one 3 Mbps pipe (I know that's not exactly how it works) I looked into Bonded DSL but that's not a service that AT&T offers in my area as of yet, but what is the difference between Bonded DSL and just 2 DSL lines? Anybody have any advice or something I haven't thought of to get higher speed internet in the middle of nowhere?

12/6/2007 11:18:10 AM

Oh no, you can't download your 500-600GB of media per month anymore

Where are you anyway that you don't have the choice of a good connection?

12/6/2007 11:21:48 AM

Quote :

"How hard would it be to get both services and tie them together somehow to make one 3 Mbps pipe"

not hard

I know the linksys RV016 has two WAN ports and load balancing on the factory software. I don't know much else about it or if there are other cheaper solutions, but that is one to get you started in the right direction.

[Edited on December 6, 2007 at 11:25 AM. Reason : asdf]

12/6/2007 11:23:43 AM

I'd imagine I could do the same thing on a PC with multiple NICs right? Rather than spend $400 on a new router.

12/6/2007 12:27:40 PM

i dont think its that easy.

12/6/2007 12:32:19 PM

You can find it for a lot cheaper... but I don't think just putting two network cards in is going to balance things how you'll want it. I may be wrong, but I don't think I am.

12/6/2007 12:57:34 PM

well I mean use the PC as a load balancer/firewall/QoS machine. I didn't just mean plug in 2 connections to my desktop and everything would magically work. With the right software, a PC should be able to do everything a router can right? I mean at least on this small of a scale.

12/6/2007 1:00:59 PM

Probably... I'm not familiar with the software to do it but there is probably something out there. Let us know what you find tho, I'm interested in this as well.

12/6/2007 1:01:50 PM

This looks promising. http://www.netlife.co.za/content/view/34/34/

12/6/2007 1:04:52 PM

I'm gonna put that on a virtual machine here in a minute just to play with it.. bored at work.

12/6/2007 1:06:57 PM

So I just found out Earthlink offers 3.0 Mbps DSL to my new house. I suppose that's acceptable, however all this talk of dual wan routers really makes me want to order 2 lines worth of DSL. I'm not sure it's worth $100+ a month for 6 Mbps, but I suppose I can always upgrade in the future.

12/6/2007 1:10:51 PM

^ You would need to use multiple connections simultaneously to take advantage of multiple DSL lines. You can't have a single connection use the combined bandwidth of both lines. However, you can have 2 connections (processes) that would each use the full bandwidth of one line.

12/6/2007 1:49:57 PM

Yeah, I know. I do the majority of my downloading using newsgroups which have all the files split up into parts and the program I use to download supports threaded downloads across multiple connections, so that would be fine.

But yeah, I guess for downloading single files across http or ftp it would only max out one connection. I didn't really think about that.

12/6/2007 1:58:37 PM

can't you have a proxy server and bridge the two connections in the OS, then share them among the network? Probably be more expensive than a specialized router... nvm

12/6/2007 2:01:45 PM

Well not if you already had a spare computer or two just sitting around. I've got a file server that would be perfect for this application if I ever do decide to go that route.

12/6/2007 2:05:17 PM

haha, this thread reminds me of the time someone couldn't understand why LACP wouldn't work over redundant roadrunner connections.

12/6/2007 2:09:13 PM

get an old computer

install NICs in it

install pfSense

profit

12/6/2007 2:41:42 PM

Quote :

"haha, this thread reminds me of the time someone couldn't understand why LACP wouldn't work over redundant roadrunner connections."

also this made me lol

12/6/2007 2:42:03 PM

Can't OS X Leopard and Windows both do this out of the box?

All you'd need is the modems, a switch, and your ethernet, set up the virtual interfaces, and then aggregate them. I've never done it, but IIRC, the options are there.

12/6/2007 2:58:33 PM

Basically, the IP stack would need to know that multiple NICs are available and load balance new TCP sessions in a round-robin type scheme -- similar to equal cost load balancing. Each NIC would have a unique IP address and default gateway.

I've never seen anything like this in action, and I'm not sure how either windows or OSX treats such a scenario by default. This could be accomplished, but i suspect that it would require third party software to do so.

12/6/2007 3:47:33 PM

pf, ipnat and ipfw on freebsd ftw: http://www.michaelbrumm.com/how-to-aggregate-bandwidth.html

12/6/2007 3:56:05 PM

^ good read.

i am going to use that right now.

12/6/2007 9:15:09 PM

So lets bttt this.

If I get 2 lines of dsl with AT&T and a router that supports 2 WAN ports, will this work as one pipe or not?

Is it really that easy, or is there something I'm not seeing?

12/19/2007 5:34:48 PM

You can load balance them but you can't really combine them. So you'll be able to do two 150kBps downloads simultaneously, but not one combined 300kBps download

12/20/2007 12:22:47 PM

how many 56K modems can you shotgun together?

12/20/2007 1:45:06 PM

1024

12/20/2007 3:00:48 PM

Quote :

"So lets bttt this. If I get 2 lines of dsl with AT&T and a router that supports 2 WAN ports, will this work as one pipe or not? Is it really that easy, or is there something I'm not seeing?"

The answer is entirely dependent on the router you mention.

12/20/2007 3:09:50 PM

Quote :

"get an old computer install NICs in it install pfSense profit"

12/20/2007 4:03:46 PM

I've been looking for dual wan routers and I can't really find too many good review/comparison sites. I found this for $126 and this for $114. Anyone know what features I should be looking for? Those routers supports WAN Port Load Balancing. Is that all I need? If I'm looking at spending $500 for a router to do what I want, I'll probably look into putting together a PC for it, but if I can get out for ~$100 or so, I will probably not bother.

Anyone have any recommendations for dual wan routers or features that are "must have" on such devices?

12/20/2007 4:43:46 PM

google pfsense multi wan tutorials

NexLand used to have a line of multiwan routers but I don't think they're in production any longer. IIRC Symantec bought them out a while back.

[Edited on December 20, 2007 at 9:25 PM. Reason : .]

12/20/2007 9:23:44 PM

when i was in bragaw i bridged 2 100mbps connections and downloaded from a microsoft server at about 18MBYTES/sec sustained

i used linux bridging, had 1 ip (iirc), 2 nics

[Edited on December 21, 2007 at 12:21 AM. Reason : ]

[Edited on December 21, 2007 at 12:22 AM. Reason : ]

12/21/2007 12:21:07 AM