Multihoming of multiple unencrypted wireless broadband connections available?

brxndxn

Diamond Member
Apr 3, 2001
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I live in a college apartment building that has no less than four and sometimes up to ten 802.11b networks visible. Most of these are unencrypted and can be easily accessed. (My neighbors are all too dumb to change anything but the default settings.) All of these connections are sharing Cox Communications cable modems (down 1.5mbps, up 128kbps).

My apartment has a Cox cable connection shared and encrypted with four people with 7 total computers. What would be an easy way to take advantage of the available bandwidth from the other unencrypted networks? Like, instead of having my laptop connect to another network and download from there, how would I set up multihoming so that any computer on my network can have the combined downloads of all connections.

I think I should be able to do this by having one computer with internet sharing be connected to multiple wireless networks with multiple 802.11b devices. I'm not planning on doing it.. however, I am curious and would like to know how it's best done. Is there something better (easier and cheaper) than what I suggested?
 

brxndxn

Diamond Member
Apr 3, 2001
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I don't plan on doing it if my method is the easiest way since it requires buying more hardware. However, if someone has an easier way to implement it, I will consider doing it.
 

EricT

Junior Member
Feb 28, 2003
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Your solution won't even work...
There are only 2 possible approaches : either you use the additional bandwidth by evenly distributing your pc's among the different networks so that each of your appartment's users never have more than 1 pc connected to the same WLAN. You don't need to buy anything to set things up that way, just select the right WLAN whenever you boot a machine.

If you really want the combined bandwidt to be available to one or more machines, you will need some kind of router software that understands the concept of bandwidth aggregation so that it will distribute your traffic across the different WLAN's (ie split up a download so that different parts are downloaded via different networks). About a year ago I did some tests with a couple of apps that claimed to be capable of doing this (with anything other than analog modems) but gave up because none of them worked properly (and in fact since then both companies have gone bankrupt).

I am currently using Kerio's Firewall 5 which at least will switch from my ADSL connection to my Cable connection whenever the first fails. ..
 

brxndxn

Diamond Member
Apr 3, 2001
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Well, I know that there are hardware routers that will allocate every other port to the other available connections... This means that software to do this should be possible.

I'll do a little more research. :)
 

zTargeTz

Member
Nov 24, 2003
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I tryed to do the same thing @ home, its a no go..
:(
only way i could see it happening is if some linux guru got bored and made an app that did load sharing.. but as of right now there are no affordable ways to do it