Download using 2 ISPs at once?

A

Ashton

2[H]4U
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Nov 13, 2004
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Due to a rise in cost, we had to cut our DSL from 1.2mbps back to 500kbps. My cellular internet is ~400kbps, so if I can combine these two I'm alsmot back to the old speed. I know this is possible because I remember PCs from pre-DSL times that coudl use 2 or mroe phone lines at once to create a high-speed connection...

How can I do this? does it require spcial hardware or is there simply some software I need to download?
 
Without support from the isp, you cant combine them into one connection. Since they are different ISP's you definitely cant get that support.

They make routers that support multiple wan sites and use multi-nat or something of the sort. It wouldnt help ONE download, but if you had multiple, it would try and balance them between the links. But its probably much more of a hassle than its worth.

Cellular has terrible latency from what i've heard, you probably wouldnt get good results from it. That and i hear they have pretty restrictive caps on cellular data traffic.
 
Depends on the router you have. Some will only load balance per session (example one download) where as others can load balance per packet. Using two very different connections with different delay, bandwidth, jitter etc could be especially problematic for any real-time application such as VoIP, video, streaming audio, etc.

That said, I have personally done this sort of load balancing two different ways. One was a multi-wan router from Xincom: http://www.xincom.com/products/502/overview.php

The other is with a Cisco Router: (tech doc on config): http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk648/tk361/technologies_configuration_example09186a00808d2b72.shtml
 
damn, and here I thought I could just run a program to basically increase my downlaod speeds... I'm not buying an expensive router for it...

and yes, there is a 1.5gb per month cap on my downloads, though I only planned to do this occasionally, so I wasn't worried...

thanks for all the help! I may decide to do this int he future with a different conenction, but it's jsut not worth it for an occasional download like I plan...
 
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