[ADSL2+] different between dual-bonding and load-balancing?

wesley · 28 May 2008 at 13:39

hi guys

i'm with bethere ISP and am looking for a way to get more speed. i've been googling for dual-bonding and load-balancing but cant find good informations about them

anyone know?

thanks

AbsenceJam · 28 May 2008 at 14:13

Bonding needs to be done ISP side and it combines your two lines into one fast link. Load balancing is done at your end and traffic isn't aggregated, rather connections are divided between the lines. So if you bond 2x24Mb lines you can download at 48Mb with one thread, with load balancing you would need two.

wesley · 28 May 2008 at 14:21

i've heard about this linux bonded live CD which will bonding lines no matter what ISP you're with. is that possible? even someone from bethere forum managed to bonded his 2 lines (both from bethere) and gets 38mb down/4mb up

daz · 28 May 2008 at 14:43

As mentioned, it sounds like the linux distro just comes with software to make it easy to load balance between two ADSL connections.

Max download speed for a single file (unless you use a download manager to multi-thread the download) is still limited to the bandwidth of one of the connections.

wesley · 28 May 2008 at 14:55

interesting you said that cos this person from bethere forums displayed the result from speedtest

sorry, its 33mb down/2.3mb up, but still good!

Netvyper · 28 May 2008 at 16:28

wesley said:
interesting you said that cos this person from bethere forums displayed the result from speedtest

sorry, its 33mb down/2.3mb up, but still good!

Got a link to this distro?
to the best of my knowledge; there's no way to do this just with software at your end of the connection.

AbsenceJam · 28 May 2008 at 16:30

Had more of a look into this, the CD you're referring to is This which uses MLPPP to acheive the bonding and requires specific PCI modems. You don't need that Linux CD but I suppose it makes it easier. Be* don't support MLPPP but it seems some ISP's/Networks like Enta do. It's just like bonded ISDN really, done on the network level but the network needs to support it.
There's also per packet routing which you can find on some high end equipment, this balances packets and not just connections.

The person to whom that speedtest belongs is a mystery. He appears to be using pfSense in a 'per connection' load balancing setup so I don't quite understand why he'd get such speeds from a speedtest. Even with per packet routing it woudln't make sense to me as surely the speedtest is only interesting in the one IP.