Sharing 2 DSL/cable modems...

[grumm3t]

Next year I am moving away from home for college and I am betting on the network connection sucking. So I have a few questions: For one, you can't get cable/dsl to a dorm can you? That's not really a problem because I plan on getting an apartment outside the school. So here come the "real" questions:

1) Can you get 2 DSL or cable modem connections to your house, or can you only have 1 DSL and 1 cable?

2) How can you "share" the connection so you can use both the connections at the same time? Like say a host (sp. www.penguinhosting.com ) say they have "4 Multi-Homed T1s"...

For those who don't understand me, I have created a simple diagram that shows you the setup I would prefer (and yes, I have no life )

Diagram is viewable here.

Now there are a few things I would like, but which are not neccisary:

1) No client software needed - I would prefer to not have to install any type of "client" software on my roomates computers for them to be able to access the internet.. Just bring a computer, and plug it in.

2) Ability to transfer files - I would like to be still able to transfer files from computer to computer through the linux box router.

3) Speed - The software should be able to support the connection speed of the DSL/cable modem lines... which I guess would be about 400k/s for cable, 300k/s for DSL.

Any recommendations on what to look for? Thanks!

grummet

 

[ojai00]

1) You can get 2 cable connections, but since you only have one phone line, I think the maximum number of DSL connections would stay at 1. You can also have 1 DSL and 1 cable because they run on 2 different lines.
2) You can't share cable connections because there are 2 different IPs. There's really no advantage to doing that anyway, because if you're looking to increase bandwith, the bandwith is capped. (Hope that was clear ).

Second set of answers:

1) All they would need is TCP/IP
2) You can do that through a cable/DSL router, which has a built in switch.
3) It really depends on the bandwith that you'll be getting. If the cap is at 1.5MB, then the max you can get is about 252kb/s.

Hope this helps.

 

[Garion]

Actually, you can have as many DSL lines as you want. You just have to have a separate phone line for each of them. I've got one lab that we have about 6 DSL lines in - No problems.

There's a router that will let you share two different broadband connections - It's about $300, and I forget the name, but you can search the forumn.

Another option is to run something from Fat Pipe Networks that allows a single PC with multiple Internet connections to share them and spread the load. This doesn't help with a cable modem, as the single cable segment is shared by EVERYONE in the neighborhood. If you bought two cable modems, they are on the same segment, so you wouldn't really get much better performance. Perhaps downloading and uploading you'd see a bump with two capped connections, but for normal browsing it would be about the same.

- G

 

[wedi42]

the router

i've posted this so much it should be in the FAQs