How Would you do this? Would it be worth it?

smogsy

smogsy

smogsy

Soldato
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9 Dec 2006
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*This is purely a can it be done stage*

I currently have BE Internet with 10MB of 24mb speeds with 2.5mb up.

However i can get Another Broadband line on a 2nd phoneline + small line rental fee + calls for free (but dont think i could use them as a main line do to usage)

so i was thinking could i use the 2nd line on my network?
Would it be worth it?

My idea was to use the 2nd line for Downloads & general usage + calls & other line for Pure Gaming.

For example Gaming PC - Downloading a game Via say Battle.net on BB 2 whilst gaming on steam on BB1.

I currently have this setup
Netgear DGN3500
Netgear 16 port gigabit switch

PC's:
Gaming Rig - router
Linux Box - switch
Imac - switch
Macbook - router
TV,bluray,ipods & few laptops etc - switch

Would it be worth it?
Would it be possible to have 2 internet lines routed correctly for this?
How can this be done?
 
Sure, there's two options. Firstly you can get a hardware load balancer or a firewall that'll let you do policy based routing and then you could set up a rulebase for certain traffic source/destinations to go out on a certain connection. Or you could simply have the router for each connection sat on the same network (ie. one on 192.168.1.1 and one on 192.168.1.2) and then just manually set the default gateway on those systems that you want to use a specific connection.
 
Bethere offer line bonding too but to be honest you're paying out a lot of cash for not much gain (with the Be offering at least).

Something like brs has suggested may be better though - as they're probably offering line bonding for the 'correct' reasons rather than just to nearly double your speed.
 
I should add, my solution would be not doing it. I spent a lot of time playing with bonding, load sharing and the like in a past job (I had two free DSL max lines at home and all the kit I wanted to make it work, so plenty incentive to make it work) and I concluded we couldn't make a sensible product out of it in the end.

It's seriously hard work to come up with something which works effectively at all and even then you need to be basically doing a few things at once, you'll never get 2x 10Mbit lines to give you a 20Mbit download speed basically.

My best effort as I mentioned was a router in a datacenter, two GRE tunnels and OSPF round robin between the two, with the datacenter router presenting my public IPs so I could in theory get full speed peer to peer over the two lines. It worked to a degree but was prone to breaking in curious ways without much provocation and (with the datacenter router to add to the cost) wasn't a cheap option.

Even assigning some apps to one line and some to others is actually harder than it initially seems (even with good kit), you get caught up with where you send DNS and the like and you need a good router/firewall to do it.
 
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