ADSL + cable, is it possible to "merge" this BW?
 

Hi all,

Question, friend of mine(yeah even I do have some:)) has cable AND ADSL internet...He is using one as "backup" now...

ADSL 8 MBIT down, 1MBIT up, cable 2MBIT down, and small upload. Is it possible to "merge" this into 10 MBIT down? If so, what is the easiest solution?

Thnx

Andre

Hmm, yea I think you could do it, you'd prolly need to make a linux firewall, set the load balancing to 80% DSL, 20% to cable, you could likely piggy back them... although , if you wanted to do something like that , I'd get 2 8mbps dsl links from 2 providers and get 16 =)

Pretty cool... I remember something back when dialup was common that let you merge two phonelines/modems together... :)

you can merge with a router like this one
however, you wont get the full upload speed on one thread. meaning if you want to send someone a file, it wont go full speed, but it multiple people are receiving files from you, it will use the bw from both the cable and dsl

Simple answer? You can't.

A bit more complicated answer? Ok you can....

One way is like the poster above me said. You can "combine" the connections, but you can never max out BOTH connections on the SAME tcp stream.

Meaning.. One download will max out cable, the next max out DSL. If you have multiple users, this is pretty cool.

The other way is to do it how you really mean (1 download maxes both connections out).

This is more or less impossible. However, lets say your friend had a linux box somewhere close by that both the cable and DSL had a good route to. That linux box also had a lot of bandwidth on it.

You can in that case, basically make both connections "tunnel" back to the linux box, which would then "combine" them via something like mlppp or whatever. Essentially channel bonding. However, your IP would appear as the linux machines, and you would also be traversing the internet to the linux box for ALL your packets, THEN eating your bandwidth not only at home, but wherever your linux box is located. Then you get into out of order TCP and other stuff, which could kill the connection if really bad.. I havn't tried it, so I can't comment on how well this would perform.

So basically no. :) Theres not much point in tunnelling like that.. save in some specific situations (say I know my cable and DSL provider both are only a few milliseconds away from my co-located machine.. I could setup fault-tolerant load balancing and not even notice if my DSL or cable went down (one at a time at least).. But, you have all the added hops, and extra bandwidth usage you have to pay for somewhere.

So just stick with the short answer. :)

-Phil

I think my brain is going to explode =/

Thanks for the answers. I appreciate it:)

Andre