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say you have two cable modems, is there a way to use the bandwidth from both?

zanejohnson

zanejohnson

Diamond Member
not to load balance, but to combine the bandwidth.... i have a spare machine i could throw linux on, but can you combine the bandwidth say for downloading one file, or can you only load balance?
 
Originally posted by: thepd7
1) Wrong forum.
2) Don't you work in a computer shop?
Click to expand...

i own one...but we dont have a store front anymore..just do it out of my house..

i'm wondering if there is a software way to do this with linux... and i admit, i dont know....
 
Bandwidth is dependent on your provider, not on your hardware.

You can't use 2 modems at once on a single account. A modem has a MAC address, which allows communication to the next hop. Your provider will assign an IP address to that modem, which allows communication to the Internet.

Now if you had 2 accounts, sure you could have them both running. You would then want a router behind both acting as your gateway. You can't aggregate the lines because your communications aren't point to point - at any given time one session will run over one line (and by "line" I really mean broadband channel). But you could load balance by either putting in another piece of hardware that is a true loadbalancer and letting it switch lines for each new session, or you could split your network by adding static routes. Neither of these will help you download 1 file though (well perhaps the former, but only if you use P2P which is actually pulling pieces of a file from various sources).

The only reason this could be advantageous is because providers cap your speeds. If there were no cap, then the modems would just compete for the same maximum bandwidth available.

The best solution? Forget all that, and upgrade your account to raise your cap. 😛
 
You could aggregate a cable line + dsl line.

Or you could just see if something like FiOS is available.
 
You can not aggregate most residential internet lines. Unless the provider supports this. And then all your really doing is bonding lines, because they have to be bonded on both sides.
In your case all you can do is load balance. And like someone said above, this would make things like P2P faster because it could pull data from multiple sources.
 
You could certainly run any client side software to do things like PPP / VPN on your LINUX box, and those
may support channel bonding with various options. Unfortunately you'd need something server side to support
the other end of the bonding link. If you had an ISP shell account maybe you could set it up to do that, but
usually you're just out of luck.

The interesting question is, are there any good deals to be had with online services that would act as connectionless ISPs that'd offer you a VPN or PPP type link from any internet connection(s) of your choice and which would then emit your (possibly link aggregated) traffic out to and from the internet backbone?
I'm sure there are various services acting as proxies or VPN hosts but I'm not familiar with what the best deals for these might be.

I also wouldn't mind an online service that would let you download a bunch of stuff over high bandwidth to that host's disk drives then have them just burn it all to DVD and mail the DVDs to you for some nominal service charge. It'd be good for things like getting newly released LINUX distributions or public domain eBooks or whatever that you might want gigabytes of content from and not want to take hours/days to download it over a slow pipe.

Actually I've never understood why ISPs and web sites suck so badly in respect to offering services that
would help improve user bandwidth, especially back in the dialup days, but also now for broadband.

1) Multi-Link PPP support to allow bonding / aggregation of multiple independent PPP sessions for instance coming in over dialup lines or even broadband.

2) PPP with compression enabled to allow highly compressible content to achieve dramatic bandwidth advantages for both the end user and the ISP. XML / HTTP / WWW page content excluding media/image /sounds/video must be at least 80% compressible trivially. email is even moreso, and last I heart email is the major application on the internet still. It is stunning that we're wasting so much bandwidth via such an inefficient representation of information and making no attempt to compress it either at the ISP or at the server / upstream side.

3) Multicast support. ISPs complain about bandwidth use by subscribers but never have I seen good multicast support by the ISP. If there are 6000 people downloading a given thing at once, the ISP would only need one stream downloading that thing from the actual server and all 6000 people could be getting served that content via multicast. It'd work especially well for things like news sites, online video/audio/radio/TV streams, RSS feeds, popular downloads, et. al.

4) Caching proxy support for WWW at the ISP. especially effective in conjunction with end to end compression between the user and the ISP. It'd speed up browsing on many sites, especially when the end site is at the end of a slow link or has performance problems. Not that I'd want to be FORCED to use this at my ISP, but it would be a good option to offer.

5) VPN support between the ISP and end user thus enabling better provisioning of security of the link via encryption, but more relevantly to bandwidth would also enable various options for compression or link aggregation or ubiquitous access to one's ISP account whether one was on a wireless laptop, desktop at home, 3G cell phone, whatever. In the case of things like email it is relevant to be able to use one's ISP account in those circumstances even when one may not be directly coming in through one's home DSL/CABLE connection.

6) Proper ISDN; telcos / ISPs never even scratched the surface of a proper standards compliant rich
implementation of ISDN to allow things like channel bonding, multiple call appearances, voice, data, et. al.

7) Web servers that support SSL for EVERYTHING. Why have only some small percentage of "secure" pages at a given site? I'd be happier if EVERYTHING went over SSL/TLS. It'd reduce the chance for malicious eavesdropping, site impersonation (q.v. the current DNS problems), phishing via site impersonation / eavesdropping, et. al. Better yet, SSL/TLS supports data compression so instead of getting 100k of XML/HTML I get 10k of secure, compressed data.

8) ADSL service that dynamically (or even under manual control!) adjusts bandwidth in the forward vs. reverse direction. Ok, so sell me a 1544Kbit/384Kbit ADSL connection. Would it be too much to ask, though, that I get 1544Kbit down and 384Kbit up when I'm downloading and yet be able to switch it to 1544Kbit up and 384Kbit down when I'm uploading?! Or better yet just have it auto-adapt the bandwidth which is what DSL basically does anyway to deal with noise and so on...

 
Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
You could certainly run any client side software to do things like PPP / VPN on your LINUX box, and those
may support channel bonding with various options. Unfortunately you'd need something server side to support
the other end of the bonding link. If you had an ISP shell account maybe you could set it up to do that, but
usually you're just out of luck.

The interesting question is, are there any good deals to be had with online services that would act as connectionless ISPs that'd offer you a VPN or PPP type link from any internet connection(s) of your choice and which would then emit your (possibly link aggregated) traffic out to and from the internet backbone?
I'm sure there are various services acting as proxies or VPN hosts but I'm not familiar with what the best deals for these might be.

I also wouldn't mind an online service that would let you download a bunch of stuff over high bandwidth to that host's disk drives then have them just burn it all to DVD and mail the DVDs to you for some nominal service charge. It'd be good for things like getting newly released LINUX distributions or public domain eBooks or whatever that you might want gigabytes of content from and not want to take hours/days to download it over a slow pipe.

Actually I've never understood why ISPs and web sites suck so badly in respect to offering services that
would help improve user bandwidth, especially back in the dialup days, but also now for broadband.

1) Multi-Link PPP support to allow bonding / aggregation of multiple independent PPP sessions for instance coming in over dialup lines or even broadband.

2) PPP with compression enabled to allow highly compressible content to achieve dramatic bandwidth advantages for both the end user and the ISP. XML / HTTP / WWW page content excluding media/image /sounds/video must be at least 80% compressible trivially. email is even moreso, and last I heart email is the major application on the internet still. It is stunning that we're wasting so much bandwidth via such an inefficient representation of information and making no attempt to compress it either at the ISP or at the server / upstream side.

3) Multicast support. ISPs complain about bandwidth use by subscribers but never have I seen good multicast support by the ISP. If there are 6000 people downloading a given thing at once, the ISP would only need one stream downloading that thing from the actual server and all 6000 people could be getting served that content via multicast. It'd work especially well for things like news sites, online video/audio/radio/TV streams, RSS feeds, popular downloads, et. al.

4) Caching proxy support for WWW at the ISP. especially effective in conjunction with end to end compression between the user and the ISP. It'd speed up browsing on many sites, especially when the end site is at the end of a slow link or has performance problems. Not that I'd want to be FORCED to use this at my ISP, but it would be a good option to offer.

5) VPN support between the ISP and end user thus enabling better provisioning of security of the link via encryption, but more relevantly to bandwidth would also enable various options for compression or link aggregation or ubiquitous access to one's ISP account whether one was on a wireless laptop, desktop at home, 3G cell phone, whatever. In the case of things like email it is relevant to be able to use one's ISP account in those circumstances even when one may not be directly coming in through one's home DSL/CABLE connection.

6) Proper ISDN; telcos / ISPs never even scratched the surface of a proper standards compliant rich
implementation of ISDN to allow things like channel bonding, multiple call appearances, voice, data, et. al.

7) Web servers that support SSL for EVERYTHING. Why have only some small percentage of "secure" pages at a given site? I'd be happier if EVERYTHING went over SSL/TLS. It'd reduce the chance for malicious eavesdropping, site impersonation (q.v. the current DNS problems), phishing via site impersonation / eavesdropping, et. al. Better yet, SSL/TLS supports data compression so instead of getting 100k of XML/HTML I get 10k of secure, compressed data.

8) ADSL service that dynamically (or even under manual control!) adjusts bandwidth in the forward vs. reverse direction. Ok, so sell me a 1544Kbit/384Kbit ADSL connection. Would it be too much to ask, though, that I get 1544Kbit down and 384Kbit up when I'm downloading and yet be able to switch it to 1544Kbit up and 384Kbit down when I'm uploading?! Or better yet just have it auto-adapt the bandwidth which is what DSL basically does anyway to deal with noise and so on...
Click to expand...

Not to burst your bubble, but $$$$ is why. You do mention some good ideas though.

By the way, notice the little lock/unlock icon at the bottom of your browser? That's about how much the average user really cares about security until it bites them. 🙁
 
Maybe upgrade your account like go with a higher tier? That might be more beneficial than going through all this hassle to try and make two lines work together as one.
 
Unless you have two lines going back to tap on your street this isn't going to do you any good. Usually each house only has one coaxial cable exiting the house back to the tap on the street. Each modem will share this spectrum on the line dedicated to HSD. Also in order to get the both modems online you will need to pay twice for service which to me seems like a waste of money to do.
 
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