Hypothetically, could you?

Devrij

Devrij

Devrij

Soldato
Joined
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Double your ADSL downstream by getting a 2nd line run into your house and then bridging the connections? Or building a giant communal WiFi network on your street (assuming you trusted your neighbours) by using all their lines and bridging all the routers? In theory your max bandwidth would then become the maximum your cabinet could support, no? It would be a cool experiment if you could get a load of 50Mb neighbours and join them into a big gigabit network (if you had the hardware of course).

But yeah, is it possible?
 
Orcvader said:
Would be possible, but the hardware required will be expensive :p. And then the monthly costs...
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Monthly costs would double if you got two lines I'm guessing? Otherwise I could hit the heady speeds of 12Mb!

My gf's brother lives opposite us within wireless range so I was tempted to experiment with his broadband as he never really uses it properly.
 
That sounds more complex than I had expected! Thanks for the info, I suspect that's a route for more skilled people than me lol.
 
the hardware isn't actually that expensive

TP-LINK TL-R470T+ load balancing router for up to 4 WAN ports (though you'd need 1 for LAN to connect a wireless router to)
to use 2 lines in a single house you'd then just need 2 modems... to use your neighbours wireless is marginally more tricky but you'd just need a wireless repeater with an RJ45 on it to connect it to this box ^

or the LINKSYS WRT54GL which is a wireless router with dual WAN load balancing support
 
Devrij said:
Monthly costs would double if you got two lines I'm guessing? Otherwise I could hit the heady speeds of 12Mb!

.
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i got a price for a bonded solution recently for someone, you can bond 2,3 or 4 lines..

Im sure 2 bonded lines was something like £100 a month, it was way more than double
 
edscdk said:
i got a price for a bonded solution recently for someone, you can bond 2,3 or 4 lines..

Im sure 2 bonded lines was something like £100 a month, it was way more than double
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see above - you can get 2 normal lines installed and then "bond" them yourself with a load balancing router

yeah bonded lines as a service is typically higher than just the cost of 2 lines as there aren't that many providers who do it so they charge you through the nose for it, but you can just do it yourself the cheap way
 
Bonded lines aren't the same as line balancing though.

Be bond 2 broadband lines together and once glued you can attain the full speed of both lines on a single download or stream, 2 x 24MB lines become 1 x 48MB line for example. They charge £65 for 2 connections for this plus your normal line rental cost

The line balancing spreads the connections over both lines so you'll never achieve the full throughput on a single download for example, just the full speed of whichever line you've been balanced through for that download. For example, If I use a download manager and split it into 10 parts they always go through 1 line and dont get balanced over both lines. If I start a new download, that might get balanced over the other line but I've never had it happen over both.
 
Bonded is the way to go here as said, not load balancing.

We use line balancing at work on 2 ADSL2+ lines, it's very handy for businesses where you've got many connections and services, the load can be split between the lines. But sheer bandwidth is no better, same up and same down speeds as a single line as you'll only ever be using the one line at any one connection and each connection has it's own IP.

Load balancing has it's issues, especially where IP detections are concerned. Here's an example from work:
Downloading latest Solidworks patch files from a server. The server receives the requests for the files from say 10.10.10.10 and starts sending them back but then after a while the next file request is from 10.10.11.10 and it just falls over.
 
Rossi~ said:
Bonded is the way to go here as said, not load balancing.

We use line balancing at work on 2 ADSL2+ lines, it's very handy for businesses where you've got many connections and services, the load can be split between the lines. But sheer bandwidth is no better, same up and same down speeds as a single line as you'll only ever be using the one line at any one connection and each connection has it's own IP.

Load balancing has it's issues, especially where IP detections are concerned. Here's an example from work:
Downloading latest Solidworks patch files from a server. The server receives the requests for the files from say 10.10.10.10 and starts sending them back but then after a while the next file request is from 10.10.11.10 and it just falls over.
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We have experimented with load balancing too, and for online tools that require a secure connection (e.g. online banking) load balancing just wasn't feasible.
 
true, but I would have thought that those applications are pretty niche... for normal home user type stuff - if you couldn't get fttc or whatever

the advantage of load balancing is that it would be a lot cheaper and you could e.g. be downloading a large file on one connection whilst gaming on the other... or if you're running multiple downloads / browsing / multi users in home watching iplayer etc. then load balancing is perfectly adequate, and easily enough disabled if need to do something specific that it's causing problems with

the OP is clearly a home user who wants a sometimes boost without the extra cost of FTTC or other cable service, a load balancing router would be the cheapest way to do that

for businesses who want extra throughput there are better tools that allow you to account for dedicating a line to a particular task to get around these issues, without needing a bonded line - though yes if you dedicate a line to a task then you're back down to a single line for completing that task

as a business, if maximum throughput is that important then you really need to look at relocating to somewhere that offers a decent connection, rather than cobbling ADSL lines together
 
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Zeroshell (Linux distro) will let you bond ADSL lines, but you will need another zeroshell machine in the cloud as well. (there may be some VPS's out there that can cater for this?)

Usefull for bonding VPN's in a remote office if you dont want to shell out for a hardware solution
 
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