Is it possible to combine 2 broadband connections

STaN

Can this be done with routers or whatever... say 2 3Mb/384 connections?

lynchie

Depends what you want to use them for, load balancing or failover.

Yes it can be done, cheaply or expensive.. We went the exepsnive way.. Cisco router ~950 euro. Eircom main line, with IBB as backup and we push our email over it as it has greater upload.

Cheaply, you can pick up netgear or linksys routers that will do it too. Check broadbandbuyer.co.uk for info on them.

There are side effects of using load balancing. Session based sites can cause issues, e.g. on amazon, you add something to your cart, when you click checkout, its possible the router could send your request out on the second broadband connection and amazon would think your a new visitor and not know about your shopping cart. I think some of the routers have logic built in to prevent this, but you need to find out which ones do.

If you are trying to use two connections to maximse downloads, i.e. being able to download a 1gb file from MS using two 3Mb lines to get 6Mb then this isn't possible either. I think one of the expensive solutions can do this, but most of them wont. If you are downloading a torrent, then as this is downloaded in pieces from multiple sources, then yes, you could get 6Mb from using two lines.

bk

Ok there are two different options here Combining Bandwidth, where you get the full 6mb download bandwidth for one file, this is extremely hard and expensive to do.

Or Load Balancing two connections, where any one file only gets a max of 3m, but if you are downloading multiple files at the same time, then the two files would get 3m each at the same time.

I believe this nice fellow will do load balancing and isn't very expensive:
http://www.dsl-warehouse.co.uk/product.asp?pr=FVS124G

It would be great to use one of these with one DSL connection and one cable connection to ensure uptime, it also comes with a firewall and a nice gigabit ethernet switch.

You could also do with with a PC with a few ethernet cards running Linux or with some other software. Just do a google for info.

tomk

Yes it can - and if someone would just give me a second connection, I'd do it.

Re routers - I think you can buy off-the-shelf gear that will do this, but that's not PC World's shelf we're talking about. That would be professional gear, in a different price range altogether from your everyday DSL router.

OTOH, if you know Linux, or you have the time to learn it, and you don't mind a bit of tinkering, grab an old PC and a handful of NICs, and read this - preferably all of it, but particularly this chapter.

btkm8unsl0w5r4

Have to say this is an interesting question....I remember windows 98 could combine two modems out of the box. I tried it for a while and it worked OK. Would be nice to use my wireless broadband for uploads and some super wired briadband for download.

STaN

We're getting a 2Mb/2Mb SDSL connection so i was wondering if that could be combined with one with a higher download speed.

We need a lot of upload bandwidth to our servers.

bk

STaN wrote:

We're getting a 2Mb/2Mb SDSL connection so i was wondering if that could be combined with one with a higher download speed.

We need a lot of upload bandwidth to our servers.

Since you are looking at a business environment, then you should look at Cisco kit to do this. The netgear is only for home environments.

crawler

If you get a Cisco router than can run MLPPP (Multi link PTP) you can combine both to provide a single connection....the cisco IOS has various commands for doing this...

Blaster99

You probably need Cisco equipment at the other end to unbond (or whatever it's called) the two connections, though?

With the insane pricing in the Irish market (4Mbps costs twice that of 3Mbps type of thing), it's not surprising that people look to do channel bonding. I looked at it but decided that it's too complicated to get working right and went for a fail-over setup instead which works reasonable well. That obviously only gives reliability which in my case is important.

I haven't checked the links above, but I know Linksys does a cheap-ass load balancing router. The reviews of it were not complimentary, though. It might be better to pay real money for this type of solution, but not necessarily Cisco money even though they are undisputed kings of networking. It might be possible to run aftermarket firmware on a WRT54G to do this, seeing as they run Linux.

lynchie

crawler wrote:

If you get a Cisco router than can run MLPPP (Multi link PTP) you can combine both to provide a single connection....the cisco IOS has various commands for doing this...

yup, you need two connections from the same ISP and they have to have equipment on their end too...

We're getting a 2Mb/2Mb SDSL connection so i was wondering if that could be combined with one with a higher download speed.

We need a lot of upload bandwidth to our servers.

With the cisco gear, you can designate access to certain servers, ports, protocols etc.. to be sent out a specific link, so you could say, anybody connecting to this server, goes out the SDSL link, while everybody else, who is doing general web browsing / downloading etc goes out another link, eg a 6Mb ADSL link

STaN

lynchie wrote:

With the cisco gear, you can designate access to certain servers, ports, protocols etc.. to be sent out a specific link, so you could say, anybody connecting to this server, goes out the SDSL link, while everybody else, who is doing general web browsing / downloading etc goes out another link, eg a 6Mb ADSL link

This sounds ideal.

Could you recommend a cisco router for this? - Would this be combined aswell with a firewall? (Ideally we'd also like to support VPN and DMZ aswell)

Could the netgear handle this? http://www.dsl-warehouse.co.uk/product.asp?pr=FVS124G

lynchie

I bought a Cisco 1811 for the office. It has everything, firewall, vpn, dmz and seems to do the job. Im sure the netgear will do everything too, but boss wanted to go with cisco instead of the "cheaper" alternative.. At €900 for the cisco, you may be better getting the netgear, and if it doesn't do everything you need, you could always go with the cisco.