Joining multiple connections

postmanfw · 14 Oct 2007 at 18:30

My parents live just next door and i was wondering if it is possible to join our 2 internet conections together without having to buy any fancy equipment?

Obviously i use theirs wirelessly and mine straight from router but can only use on or the other at a time. Would be nice to be able to combine them for better speeds

thanks in advance

sidethink · 14 Oct 2007 at 18:48

Certain Linux router/firewall distro's allow you to bond multiple connections IIRC as do some good firewall/router appliances, Draytek do one as do Zyxel - I have no knowledge of software based solutions though.

oddjob62 · 14 Oct 2007 at 18:59

sidethink said:
Certain Linux router/firewall distro's allow you to bond multiple connections IIRC as do some good firewall/router appliances, Draytek do one as do Zyxel - I have no knowledge of software based solutions though.

That would work if the connections came in a the same place, i believe the OP is talking about connections in 2 neighboring houses.

sidethink · 15 Oct 2007 at 08:33

oddjob62 said:
That would work if the connections came in a the same place, i believe the OP is talking about connections in 2 neighboring houses.

And that would be sorted with some creative cabling...

wij · 15 Oct 2007 at 10:08

You could put a load balancing router at your house and bring a cable feed from your parents router into that, along with a connection from your own ADSL modem, that would at least allow you to do some kind of round robin connection balancing, although I don't know any cheap routers that can simply do bandwidth agregation.

Although for things like torrents that are effectively multi-sourced it should give you the full speed of both lines, and you could just use a multi-threaded download tool for regular stuff.

Columbo · 15 Oct 2007 at 10:20

I'd be interested in a solution for this as I have 2 phones lines into my house. I have UKFSN on one and Sky on the other (its free)and a way to aggregate these would be nice.

Sp00n · 15 Oct 2007 at 10:21

postmanfw said:
without having to buy any fancy equipment?

No not really.

branddaly · 15 Oct 2007 at 11:39

You're gonna have a problem combining them without any fancy equipment, however you could problem aggregate them by adding the routes to your PC manually.

If its a Windows PC, then you could add some additional routes at a DOS prompt using a
'route add' command. That way you could send half the traffic, or any splits you feel like really, via one gateway (wired router) and half via the other (wireless).

wij · 15 Oct 2007 at 13:40

ManCuBuS said:
I'd be interested in a solution for this as I have 2 phones lines into my house. I have UKFSN on one and Sky on the other (its free)and a way to aggregate these would be nice.

DrayTek, Linksys etc. all seem to be offering cheapish dual-wan load balancers for around the £100 mark. I can't comment on how well these will perform but in theory you could just use one of those combined with two ethernet ADSL modems.

Clown · 15 Oct 2007 at 13:55

Sp00n said:
No not really.

What fancy equipment would I need if I wanted to do this then?

mattyrigby00 · 15 Oct 2007 at 13:58

not sure but i think it might be illegal to share broadband connections between 2 houses

Columbo · 15 Oct 2007 at 14:04

wij said:
DrayTek, Linksys etc. all seem to be offering cheapish dual-wan load balancers for around the £100 mark. I can't comment on how well these will perform but in theory you could just use one of those combined with two ethernet ADSL modems.

Superb, I will look into this later today. Would be good as I get around 6.4mb on the UKFSN line and around 12mb on Sky (on a good day).

However I hardly use the Sky connection (its crap) latencies are high, contention issues galore and its unstable but it cost £10 and its just for the family. I use the UKFSN just for me and my business but the potential for an 18mb line is very tempting

wij · 15 Oct 2007 at 14:23

ManCuBuS said:
...the potential for an 18mb line is very tempting

It doesn't quite work like that though.

The balancer is not performing true "bonding" of the lines, instead it would simply perform basic load balancing over the two connections, although as I mentioned before if you were using a multi-threading application, such as a download manager or somthing like bit torrent then yes you could in theory get a higher overall download speed.

You do however get the added bonus of redundency, so if one link fails the other would still be there and active, with the DrayTek's you can specify QoS rules so that certain traffic would be forced down one of the connections, i.e. you could assign certain machines in your house given IPs and then only permit that traffic onto the Sky connection.

Columbo · 15 Oct 2007 at 14:34

wij said:
It doesn't quite work like that though.

The balancer is not performing true "bonding" of the lines, instead it would simply perform basic load balancing over the two connections, although as I mentioned before if you were using a multi-threading application, such as a download manager or somthing like bit torrent then yes you could in theory get a higher overall download speed.

You do however get the added bonus of redundency, so if one link fails the other would still be there and active, with the DrayTek's you can specify QoS rules so that certain traffic would be forced down one of the connections, i.e. you could assign certain machines in your house given IPs and then only permit that traffic onto the Sky connection.

Spot on. I use the newsgroups quite a lot with Newsbin Pro so hopefully all should be good. I do like the idea of the QoS rules and the screnario you've explained above would be the way I'd go.

Any security issues with deploying the above?