Two Internet Connections At The Same Time?

[jtzou]

Here's the situation. I live in a college dorm that has two Ethernet ports (meant for two people). However, my roommate is moving out (through no fault of mine). Now I want everything to go faster, so now that I'll have two Ethernet ports at my disposal (each at 10 Mbps), is there any way I could use both ports to get a total of 20 Mbps? I realize that I will probably end up with 2 IP addresses, but can I get 20 Mbps of speed if I put in another NIC card? I remember reading that ISDN for some people was two 56k modems on two phone lines, where one acted as Upload and one acted as Download. I'm pretty sure there is some way to make it so that you could use both ports for either Upload and Download, but I was just wondering if there was anything special that I would need to do to get 20 Mbps.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Dunno where you heard that about ISDN, but it's wrong. ISDN is a digital all the way phone line, not an analog like 56k, and uses two channels at 64k each (real 64k not maximum of 53k but lower depending on line quality like 56k analog), though sometimes it may be set up as 56k (still real digital 56k) per channel depending on the particular way it's done. Maybe that's what you heard about, but each channel isn't just upload or download, they're bonded and act just like a single connection.

In a realistic sense, you can't make your two ports work like a single port. To do that would require your school's network administrator to configure the switch or whatever you connect to so as to bond the two ports, assuming that they even connect directly to the main switch and not a dumb switch used for each floor or something, and assuming they have a switch that supports that which they probably don't since it's more expensive, and assuming they'd even be willing to GIVE you the tools to use more than your share of the bandwidth. You'd also need to have your system set up to support, which may take particular network adapters and drivers.

There was a thread a few days ago asking a similar question. There are hardware devices (routers) available that take two Ethernet connections (for use with any type of "modem" for any sort of Internet service) and they direct traffic over the two ports to kind of even it out, but that's not the same as making them act as one port. Each port still has its own IP address -- the router manages individual network connections from your machine to remote servers. If your browser opens 4 connections to a server to get a page, 2 of them would pass over one port, 2 on the other. The web server would see both IPs and think they were different machines. If you started a download, it would only use one of the ports, maxing at 10Mbps theoretical speed. In theory, if that download was using all the bandwidth, then the router could automatically direct all your other non-high bandwidth traffic to the other port, so that downloading wouldn't slow down your web browsing or gaming.

There may also be software available to do a similar thing using two network cards. But it still isn't going to be as good as it sounds.

 

[jtzou]

Well, I think there are some Load Balancing softwares that will do this, but I'm not sure of any and how much they cost. Does anyone know of any good softwares that would do what I want? I'm curious what is out there, regardless of price.

 

[spidey07]

FYI, cisco switches default to autochanneling. Meaning if you plug into both ports with two nics that support "etherchannel", a proprietary cisco bonding protocol you may be able to use both ports.

Intel nics support this.

Whether or not you'll realize any performance gains depend highly on how the rest of the network is designed and the hosts you're communicating with.