Doubling Internet Connection Speed

Question

Hi Friends,

Scenario: I have two ADSL modem that are connected to to different ISPs. Each has 256KBps Speed. Question:Is it possible to have 512KBps speed?(I have one PC that can be host any OS) Is any special appliance essential for doing that?

Thanks in Advance, Ashkan.

Answer 1

This is called multihoming or load-balancing.

The simplest way to do this would be to buy a router with two WAN ports that supports load balancing. These are generally expensive. ($180; Cisco RV042 ).

Alternatively you can set up a computer with 3 network interfaces to do the routing for you.

Windows

Using regedit navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\NetBT\Parameters

Create 32-bit dword value "RandomAdapter" with a value of 1

You will need to set the "metric" value of the different adapaters if you find traffic is still favouring one connection over the other.

From my answer on serverfault, the "route" command is used to set this metric. The basic syntax is;

 route ADD <destination> <subnet mask> <gateway (vpn dhcp server)> <metrix> IF <interface number> -p

There's some tutorials floating around here and there.

Linux

See the answers on serverfault

Answer 2

RJFalconer is right, but you should know that if you do this, no single TCP connection will be able to get more than 256kBps. It's much like SMP in that manner.

You may also run into trouble with (web) applications and protocols that assume every user has a single IP address at any one time. If you can replace the two connections with a single faster one, that would be vastly preferable.