bond multiple DSL lines

[cfeghali]

HI!

I ordered two ADSL lines for home in hope of being able to use them both as a single, double speed ADSL Line. but I can't figure out how to bind them so I can use the speed on only one computer. Each one use an ethernet RJ45 conection. My current configuracion is:
2 NICs
One that receives the DSL
The other conects the LAN
This way a can share the DSL on all my network.

Please reply anyone that knows a good way to do it. All I need is bond the two lines in one and share them over the lan.

I have a fixed IP for each DSL and I don't need any software to get the internet signal. what I mean is that I don't need software PPPoE to connect like with regular DSL providers. the signal i get is ready to use. Like the one you get directly from a T1 router.

thank you for your help,
Cesar

[cyberskye]

A hardware appliance capable of doing that is very expensive (you're talking equipment really only needed by ISPs). I hear rumors of software that can do this but have never seen any proof.

Nexland sells a router that allows load balancing across 2 WAN connections but that won't double your throughput - just picks the least congested line to use at the time you connect.

You're much better off cancelling your second account and increasing line speed on the one you keep.

Skye

[Kip Patterson]

There is nothing you can do from your end to combine them on a single IP connection. That has to be done at the ISP end, and as Cyberskye points out, it is expensive. I'm not aware of any DSL or cable ISP's that wil do this.

Kip

[cfeghali]

Thank you guys, but still I think there should be a way. For instance, Shotgun technology developed by Diamond years ago, started the new concept of bonding several 56K conections together to create a faster speeds. The whole idea started long time ago, there should some software that can do that. maybe Load balancing using diferent network cards could do it. I'm not sure how to do it though. Maybe someone was tried it using Windows 2000 Server with Load balancing.

Right now, it looks like it works. What I did is connect the two DSL and the server to one 100Mbps switch. and then from the second NIC to the second 100Mbps switch where the other workstations a re conected. the setup on TCP/IP for the NIC that connects to the DSL Modems has both fixed ip addresses and both routing addresses. Internet works, but I don't know if both or only one, and if one which one?

well, I'll apreciate an help on this matter.

thank you,
Cesar

[Mehmet]

Originally posted by cfeghali
Thank you guys, but still I think there should be a way. For instance, Shotgun technology developed by Diamond years ago, started the new concept of bonding several 56K conections together to create a faster speeds. The whole idea started long time ago, there should some software that can do that. maybe Load balancing using diferent network cards could do it. I'm not sure how to do it though. Maybe someone was tried it using Windows 2000 Server with Load balancing.

Right now, it looks like it works. What I did is connect the two DSL and the server to one 100Mbps switch. and then from the second NIC to the second 100Mbps switch where the other workstations a re conected. the setup on TCP/IP for the NIC that connects to the DSL Modems has both fixed ip addresses and both routing addresses. Internet works, but I don't know if both or only one, and if one which one?

well, I'll apreciate an help on this matter.

thank you,
Cesar

try uploading a file over the internet to someone, if it goes twice as fast as one lines upload speed then you have accomplished it my friend..

But really, why pay for 2 dsl lines, instead of upping the speed??

[cyberskye]

Maybe someone was tried it using Windows 2000 Server with Load balancing.

Load Balancing is not modem bonding - very different things you are talking about. Load Balancing picks ONE LINE OR THE OTHER; it doesn't use both at the same time. Modem Bonding (like shotgun) would enable you to use both lines simultaneously.

Question - I have an SDSL line provided by my comapny for teleworking. The proce tag on my 384/384 line is $139. I called the ISP an asked how much more it would cost to up the speed to 768/768 - an extra $60 with no new equipment required. what exactly do you expect to gain by having two fast lines vs one faster line? It is usually much cheaper to simply increase your speed.

Who is your ISP?

[cfeghali]

hi everybody,

I want to make clear why the two dsl lines. Actually both are ADSL lines, DirectTV DSL formely known as TELOCITY. It has a download speed of 1.5Mbps and upload of 256Kps.
Monthly Payment ~ $50
You see why I want both to work, it's cheap and fast.
I don't think they can upgrade the speeds on those lines, but anyway, I wanted the advantage of two independent lines for fault tolerance.

Thank you for your help guys, I apreciate it.
I still insist! there should be a way to do it!

Cesar

[Stef]

You can bond multiple ethernet devices together with Linux. The bonding driver has been available in the Linux kernel the version 2.0 and where now sitting on version 2.4.x

Originaly, the bonding driver was written for use in Beowolf clusters, but now it can be implememted on multiple ethernet lines to shotgun several internet connections together. Kinda like shotguning two modems together

However, your ISP's switches will need to support bonding as well. Ethernet bonding needs to be supported on both sides of the connection.

You might need to phone your ISP to set this up, that's when they'll ask you: "Why not pay for a higher speed ADSL line instead?"

Stef

[jazz2009]

There is a way to bond together several Internet access lines without getting the ISP involved. I saw a demo of this in a tradeshow. Search the term "broadband bonding" for more information fo the technology and how it works. My understanding is that it is bonding technology that is implemented in layer4, therefore no ISP involvement.

[radiodave]

I used WinProxy for years to bond two dial up lines. It will work for DSL too. It's been a while since I used it and it looks like they may be out of business or at least aren't developing it anymore, but I could be wrong. Also there appear to be two companies using the name WinProxy. Both products do the same thing. The software was designed for home users that had no easy way to share a single internet connection (before routers were easily available). But it also works well to "bond" multiple Internet connections for one or many users.

A Google search shows Ositis latest version is 6.1b and LAN-Projekt is 1.5.3. It is not clear if you can still pay to keep either working after the 30-day free trial. Also the LAN-Projeckt one runs on Windows 95 thru XP, not Vista or Win7. Ositis may have stopped at Win 98. You can always set it up on an old Win 98 machine, which will act as your firewall & gateway. To set it up, install three NICs, one for your LAN, one for DSL #1, and one for DSL #2. The software helps you set it up from there.

I may try all this agian myself. I still have Ositis WinProxy installed on a Win 98 machine in storage. I just got a 1.4 Mbps T1 line for reliability but am keeping my 4 Mbps AT&T ADSL for speed. It would be nice to bond them and get the best of both worlds.

[paulca]

I used WinProxy for years to bond two dial up lines. It will work for DSL too. It's been a while since I used it and it looks like they may be out of business or at least aren't developing it anymore, but I could be wrong. Also there appear to be two companies using the name WinProxy. Both products do the same thing. The software was designed for home users that had no easy way to share a single internet connection (before routers were easily available). But it also works well to "bond" multiple Internet connections for one or many users.

A Google search shows Ositis latest version is 6.1b and LAN-Projekt is 1.5.3. It is not clear if you can still pay to keep either working after the 30-day free trial. Also the LAN-Projeckt one runs on Windows 95 thru XP, not Vista or Win7. Ositis may have stopped at Win 98. You can always set it up on an old Win 98 machine, which will act as your firewall & gateway. To set it up, install three NICs, one for your LAN, one for DSL #1, and one for DSL #2. The software helps you set it up from there.

I may try all this agian myself. I still have Ositis WinProxy installed on a Win 98 machine in storage. I just got a 1.4 Mbps T1 line for reliability but am keeping my 4 Mbps AT&T ADSL for speed. It would be nice to bond them and get the best of both worlds.

Hi all, I'm a software engineer (not a network guru) but I think I have a legitimate reason for attempting "in software" ADSL bonding. I live out in the sticks and due to my distance from the exchange I get a measily 0.8M download speed. Whilst lying in bed last night it dawned on me that I can pick up a few of my neighbours wireless networks and we all share the same low adsl speed. If I could bridge our wireless networks together , and have us all share the same proxy server that was capable of splitting a download into multi-source chunks (like Free Download Manager does) , downloading a chunk from each of our ADSL connections, re-assembling , then sending it back to the browser, we'd see significantly higher download speeds. Fair enough we'd lose some in the wireless->wireless transfer , and in splitting/re-assembling the download blocks, but if I could persuade 10 of our neighbours to join my "network neighbourhood" (apologies to microsoft for the plagery) we would undoubtedly see better speeds on large downloads.

Unfortunately, I can't find a proxy server capable of doing this, so was considering merging some open souce proxy server code with some open source download manager code to see what I could come up with when I thought "Time to ask for help" ...perhaps someone has already coded something like this ???

The tricky bit I can see is that there's no point attempting to split a 500 byte html file into 10 chunks to download separately, so the proxy code would need to examine each download to see the size of the file before deciding to split it (is this possible ?) ..... perhaps it could initiate the download on a single adsl connection, then when it gets the response and sees that it's got 699MB left to go abandon it and split it over the neighbours adsl connections.

Sorry, I'm waffling now, anybody know of an open source / cheap "multiplexing,multi-source,multi adsl connection proxy server thing" ??

Also any advice on bridging 54G wireless connections so that John on the end of the street can bounce his request through numbers 48,50,52,54 and 56 to get to my server would be very welcome perhaps a line of pringle tins outside the houses in perfect alignment would do the job

[network monkey]

Recently read about a local organization doing something similar in a rural area. http://www.euroinvestor.fr/news/story.aspx?id=11572108. The owner basically combined multiple links and then offered a faster service to his neighbors. It's called broadband bonding.

[pouyan_m_r]

I used WinProxy for years to bond two dial up lines. It will work for DSL too. It's been a while since I used it and it looks like they may be out of business or at least aren't developing it anymore, but I could be wrong. Also there appear to be two companies using the name WinProxy. Both products do the same thing. The software was designed for home users that had no easy way to share a single internet connection (before routers were easily available). But it also works well to "bond" multiple Internet connections for one or many users.

A Google search shows Ositis latest version is 6.1b and LAN-Projekt is 1.5.3. It is not clear if you can still pay to keep either working after the 30-day free trial. Also the LAN-Projeckt one runs on Windows 95 thru XP, not Vista or Win7. Ositis may have stopped at Win 98. You can always set it up on an old Win 98 machine, which will act as your firewall & gateway. To set it up, install three NICs, one for your LAN, one for DSL #1, and one for DSL #2. The software helps you set it up from there.

I may try all this agian myself. I still have Ositis WinProxy installed on a Win 98 machine in storage. I just got a 1.4 Mbps T1 line for reliability but am keeping my 4 Mbps AT&T ADSL for speed. It would be nice to bond them and get the best of both worlds.

Dear Freind,

If it is possile for you , please consider me some details for configuring winproxy. I need to bond my connections and it is very vital for me.
how i can bond two My DSL connections???

Thanks

[Jonah Sabean]

I know this is a complete blast from the past, considering the topic started 2002 and last reply was in 2011, but hey, if one person can bump it, why can't I LOL. I myself have been looking into the possiblity of load balancing as, in freaking 2014, I am still suffering from 1.5Mbps speeds :/ ... I'm going to be combining three connections to hopefully get better speed because 1.5Mbps on it's own with a family of 4 is almsot unbearable (first world problem :P).

The answer to this question today is probably easier than it was then since new apps and hardware has came out, I will explain a number of methods to "bond" or "combine" multiple internet connections.

First of all, if you're talking about ADSL, in my opinion, the best way is through MLPPP from your DSL provider. However, you need support from your provider. Some DSL providers support MLPPP, (Multi-Link Point to Point Protocol) but some don't, you have to call your provider, and you might need a business account. MLPPP allows you to take multiple DSL modems, connect them to a supported router and bond all of the connections over multiple loops (phone lines) by splitting the packets over the multiple modems, which in turn doubles your speed in the case of two loops, triples in the case of three loops, etc. In order to do MLPPP, you need a supported ISP, modem and then router to connect to the multiple modems (Many people use modded routers running Tomato). You could do the bonding on your own PFSense router if you build one yourself, but you can probably find on ebay a router that supports tomato and MLPPP on ebay these days. Unlike load balancing, MLPPP has one IP address, and you get full throughput. If one line goes down, it will fail over to the other, just with less speed.

That said, not everyone is on DSL that supports MLPPP, or even the ones who are on DSL, their ISP may not support MLPPP. There is still three options I personally am aware of available today. One is a bonding service, that, just like MLPPP, splits the packets, and the other two is load balancing, which isn't exactly bonding, either through software or hardware. All of these methods are affordable to consumers.

First off, the only bonding service I'm aware of today would be would be Speedify, and takes multiple NICs in your machine connected to the internet and splits the data transfers over the NICs at the packet level and then reconstructs them on the server end, allowing you to get (almost) the combined speeds of the connections just like MLPPP. It costs you some money, but if HD video streaming is your goal over 1.5Mbps (like it is mine) it's well worth it. If you want to share the connection, you can get connectify, or simply bridge the connection on your PC and connect it to a router in your home. It sucks since you have to have your PC on all the time, but it's all I'm aware of that is affordable and easy to do other than MLPPP.

The other thing you can do is load balancing. The people who made speedify also make an app called Connectify that includes a feature called Dispatch (does that make sense LOL?) in it that load balances multiple NICs in your PC. This combines the multiple connections, but at the socket level, not packet level. So odds are your HD video streams wont be faster, but downloads that use multiple sockets like torrents or free download manager will go faster since the download is split. Web browsing may also be faster since most pages have multiple resources that can be downloaded over separate connection (Eg. Each image, CSS file, JS file, etc). The downside with load balancing is for websites that lock sessions to one IP may act funky lol. For example, BlueIMP's Ajax Chat locks session to one IP in it's default config and kicks users from the chat when the IP changed. Since you're load balancing, you're using the IPs of all the connections, and because it may switch back and forth, it can mess with stuff like this. It depends on the website though.

Alternatively, the better method in my opinion to load balance is to get a load balancing router like the TP link r470T+ for around 50 bucks, which does the exact same thing as the app, but at the router level. It doesn't have Wifi, but is an awesome router to load balance at a really good price. If you want wifi, just plug in a wifi router into it :P

[RaisinCain]

I am at a loss for words.