Binding DSL & Cable

J

John Gault

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 1, 2005
Messages
330
This is going to be a noob question so if your pissed off by that kind of stuff click the back arrow.
I remember back before DSL you could bind 2 56K modems, run them on different lines and get almost 2 times the bandwidth. I am getting fiber access on the 28th 6 down/768 up. I have dsl now. Is it possible to keep both and use all the bandwidth? Both are $29 a month and I would love 1 mb up and 9 down.
Second question: this is in the wrong place but can you keep direct TV satelight and get normal residential cable also. I dont care about the cable signal but I need it to get the fiber.
 
By wider you mean more bandwidth but my pings will be the same. As long as I dont take a ping hit. Can it be done?
 
John, back in the 56k days, you could bind modems together (some people called this "shotgunning") but it had to be supported by both the client (Windows 98 SE ownward supported this) and the ISP (their access concentrators had to support multi-linking).

The way it worked, when you dialed up to your ISP, their concentrators linked the ppp sessions together, and masked them behind one IP address. All incoming traffic to that IP address was load-balanced between the ppp sessions to your end.

The reason it won't work for dsl and cable connections is because those services are normally provided by different providers, and even if the same, it is using completely different concentrator equipment and network paths, which would be impossible to bind together.

There are some home router products that combine multiple WAN interfaces see this link (alternatively this can be setup in linux using policy-based routing), but it's not true load-balancing, it's more of alternating connections in a round-robin fashion for each network session. So you don't get twice the bandwidth, you just get two different connections at their max bandwidth each.

In other words, each session can only occupy one connection. So if you start a large file download, it will only use one of those connections. You do have the other connection free for doing other things, but it doesn't improve the rate of your download of that one file.
 
BollWeevil is entirely correct (the technical term for combining two PPP sessions into one larger pipe is Multilink PPP), and both connections need to end up at the same ISP.
 
Get a DSL and a cable subscription.

Get a dual WAN router

Plug DSL modem into one WAN uplink

Plug cable modem into other WAN uplink

Enjoy
 
I live in the SF bay area. Comcast is running a special and I think its a year at 29.95 per month if you have basic cable.
Thanks guys for the help. If I used this router http://www.amamax.com/hololbduwanf.html would it offer true load balancing? I dont need the redundancy and dont multitask that much with my connection so I am looking to get the maximum speed possible for dl'ing large files.
 
According to the person at comcast it is. They said its been available 2 weeks in my area.
 
Maybe fiber to the node. But it's definitely not fiber to your premises, it's just basic coax.
 
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