2 internet connections, 1 network

[ilovejedd]

I've had DSL connection for a couple of years now and I just recently subscribed to cable internet (price for just cable TV service is the same as the cable TV + internet bundle so I got the bundle). Cancelling the DSL would cost me, I think, $150 or $200 and as I'm paying just $18/mo for the service and it's only 6 months until contract term, it would be stupid of me to cancel. Plus, neither my DSL nor cable provider offer 6mbps connections to my area, so this might be a good way to boost my internet connection speed.

Anyway, do any of you guys have a similar setup? I've googled on it and found there are dual wan routers available but found they're a bit pricey. I saw a Hawking one that costs $50 but it had terrible reviews.

Hmm, the cable modem I'll be receiving (Motorola SB5120), I can connect to the PC via USB. Is it possible to configure my PC to use the USB (cable) connection instead of the ethernet (LAN - DSL) port? I really only need this one PC which I use as a semi-file server to utilize the extra internet speed. Hence, not having to share bandwidth with the other PCs in the house would be good. Although, it would be nice if I can use both connections concurrently. For local file and printer sharing, of course, the PC still needs to be connected to the local network (through ethernet). :)

Forgot to mention, OS on the "file server" PC is XP Home.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Here's an idea... have two routers, one for each connection. Setup two network cards on your machine, and link up. Once you have each connection working seperately (disable one or the other to test), then you can try bridging the connections.

I did this once with (believe it or not) a pair of 56k modems on two phone lines and two ISPs. Download speeds averaged 8-9k/s, which was about twice what I got with one :D

I think in theory it should work.

[ilovejedd]

Cool. :cool: PCI NICs aren't that expensive anyways. And I have an extra router I got from the office from when we changed network equipment. Hmm, come to think of it, we probably have extra ethernet cards lying around in one of the storage boxes so I really should check first. :D

I just wonder if I still have an empty PCI slot... :p

LoL, my old PC also had two modems (one was a gift) and I was wondering if I could have 2 dial-up connections at the same time. Unfortunately, my mom would have killed me if I tied up both our phone lines. :p

[Doom9]

Two networks in one machine? Keep in mind that you can't pool connections like that. Suppose you download something from a webserver. You open a TCP connection with a certain port and from a certain IP address. While the traffic can take pretty much any route, the endpoint IP and port are fixed.. so if you initiate the connection via NIC1, you can't request half the packets via NIC2.. unless you're using one of the download accelerator style applications which opens multiple connections and receives only part of a file. But your regular download via webbrowser (in fact any program that doesn't split up files into multiple parts and has multiple threads downloading parts of a file.. which of course requires server side support), you won't be faster.

On top of that come the routing difficulties.. if you have two default gateways with priority 1.. which one is the traffic supposed to take? I think it picks the one that came online last and sticks with it.. I would be surprised if Windows could actually round robin sessions via different default gateways (and thus NICs and finally ISPs).

Now you know why routers with more than one WAN link aren't so cheap.. the cheap way to handle multiple WAN links is round robin sessions, but they need to keep track of each sessions (not only TCP.. the advent of streaming and IP telephony results in a lot of UDP traffic that needs to be pre-parsed so it can be routed to the proper WAN link) which can get rather tricky. If you want speed increase, the router, in addition to the above, needs to act as download accelerator for connections that support it, and reassemble everything and send it out as a single stream on the LAN end. On top of that, for each download it needs to figure out if the remote end supports resuming (and thus the session could be split over the two WAN links).

[ilovejedd]

I was really only expecting posts regarding cheaper/recommended dual WAN routers I can use. Never really thought about network bridge and haven't really heard of it prior to Blue_MiSfit's post. Thank you for the detailed input on why it will not work.

I don't really need to increase speed for simple web browsing. Imho, 3mbps is plenty for that. What I do need extra bandwidth for is batch downloading/uploading of files of varying sizes from/to an online storage service which supports partial downloads/uploads.

Let's say I don't bridge the two adapters and just let them go their own separate ways and have the following network topology:
http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/4259/networkdiagramzc2.png (http://imageshack.us)

Can I make the "File Server" PC use the NIC connected to the router solely for LAN and the one connected to the cable modem for internet traffic? The (external USB) hard drive (connected to "File Server" PC) I'm downloading to is mapped on the other PCs. If I download using one of the other PCs and set it to save to the mapped drive, and assuming I have a simultaneous download coming from the cable modem, each with a sustained transfer rate of 300kBps, can I expect 600kBps total download speeds, more or less? The NICs on the PCs are all 10/100 and the router is a Linksys WRT54G v2. Hmm, now that I've mentioned it, I've heard about custom firmware for my particular router model. Is there one that will allow me to have dual WAN?

[foxyshadis]

If you're not using a dual-wan router you'll need to play with route.exe (I'm sure there's some gui for it, but I don't have one), which is evil. It could work in your scenario though.

I doubt a firmware could upgrade a linksys into a dual-wan, only because it has only one wan port. If you can dig all the way down into the linux core, you can put a hub on the other side, map both external ips to the one port, and set up a routing table, but you lose DHCP (ie, you have to manually set your new IP every time it changes) that way.

Perhaps you can convince one of your ISPs to support BGP and allow you to map your other ISP's IP across their network, and sell you a cisco/juniper/fortinet off the back of a truck? ;)

From quite some time ago, there are also consumer-level dual-wan routers: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=13103 There have probably been more since then, but I don't keep up on the area.

[squid_80]

Just disable the default gateway on the nic in the server that is connected to the router so it won't be used for internet access.

[BigDid]

@ilovejedd

Any success?

Did

[Doom9]

If I download using one of the other PCs and set it to save to the mapped drive, and assuming I have a simultaneous download coming from the cable modem, each with a sustained transfer rate of 300kBps, can I expect 600kBps total download speeds, more or less?Yup.. but you'll be downloading two different things. If you think "hey, I'm downloading to the same places so the two streams can simply be added up", then just forget about it.. while downloads can be broken into pieces by download managers, that only works if there's one program running on one machine that dynamically splits and reassembles things.. there's no distributed downloader.

[BigDid]

@ doom9

OT
Are you still looking for some servers/space/mirrors ?

If so I will try to contact a friend of mine in the business.

Did

[ilovejedd]

Didn't bother bridging. It seems like Windows uses the last connection you activated so I just enable the ethernet port connected to the cable modem last. I have 2 batch download queues. One on the primary computer, and one which is saved to the mapped drive on the primary computer. I'm getting an average 600kBps combined so I'm a happy camper.

[Doom9]

Are you still looking for some servers/space/mirrors ?Yes, more than ever.