Combining bandwidth from 2 or more BB Connetions

KiD0M4N

Forerunner
Hi,

This is a issue which trobled me for quite some time and finally I was able to crack it and get the facts clear. I hope this post helps some:

In the world of BroadBand connections, the market is very competitive and different ISPs excel in different areas. BSNL Dataone service is known for reliability of Downstream speeds where as Bharti (aka Airtel) is known to give excellent ping times to Singapore based servers.

Wouldnt it be just lovely if you could take a 256 Kbps connection from Dataone (for your downloads and good speeds to Indian sites) and a 128 Kbps connection from Airtel for your gaming needs ? When required you could download at full 44 kBps datarate and _|_ all other users. Alas, if only this was a perfect world.

When you take a BB conn, more often that not you are asked to configure IP settings to obtain the IP address from the DHCP server running at their site. Suppose taking the cases of two ISPs (namely KIDOSNL and RAVETEL :D) and you took one bb connection from both of them. Target: To combine the bandwidth of both the connections.

Two Scenarios Present Themshelves

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a) You can achieve the theoritical 44 kBps speed if you are smart enough and you set default routes and use download managers. Why I mention download managers? Because the DMs open multiple connections to the site to achieve the max speed. Sometimes the total number of simultaneous connections can be as high as 16 (in my case with IDM.) So each connection would go through one of the 2 connectiosn and come back over the same connection through.

b) It is impossible to achieve 44 kBps over a single end to end TCP connection as the connection has to go through one of the links. When the packet is sent out from one of the connections, it has the source IP address set to the IP address assigned to the interface. So the return packets will be coming over that connection only, all the time. And hence the speed would be either 32 kBps or 16 kBps (depending on KIDOSNL or RAVETEL.)

If you are using Linux as your OS, then you can make the best of the two connections you have. You can set queuing strategies which will allow you to play online at the same time your Bittorent is at full steam (using Priority Scheduling.)

You could disable Route Caching and make the connections go over the 2 connections alternatingly.

Summary: Unless you take a leased line and have a ISP independent IP block, you can count out the 2 ISPs reciprocating and making the required changes which will allow you to BOND the 2 connections together. Otherwise, each indivisual TCP connection is limited to the speeds of either of the connections.

Source: My brain :D

Cheers,

Karan
 
Do you know what is this option "bridge connections" ? I thought this was fo using multiple BB - I suppose I was wrong.

 
Eazy said:
Do you know what is this option "bridge connections" ? I thought this was fo using multiple BB - I suppose I was wrong.


Hmm bridging means you want to connect 2 separate networks so that they can communicate throught you. More like connection two lan segments. I has nothing to do with connection bonding.

Hope this helps,

Karan
 
Actually it is possible to use two connections.

What u need for that is a proxy. U can use two dialups that way, u hud be able to use two Bband conn that way, but yes there will need to be multiple connectins (TCP) for that to speedup anything.
 
They implement what is easy possible in Linux, in Windows. Set up the 2 connections as alternate paths. But, with whatever you may come up with, it is not possible to have a single TCP connection with b/w >= (max,b.w of 1st conn,b.w. of 2nd conn, ...)

Karan
 
t is not possible to have a single TCP connection with b/w >= (max,b.w of 1st conn,b.w. of 2nd conn, ...)

Agree with you. But mostly it does not matter. When u do most things nowadays there are multiple TCP connections...
 
kidoman said:
Hmm bridging means you want to connect 2 separate networks so that they can communicate throught you. More like connection two lan segments. I has nothing to do with connection bonding.

I clicked on the bridge connections option and I got this...

 
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