Okay guys, I was just wondering, my LAN connection to the internet is 900kb/s down and 4-5kb/sec up. I also have a modem connection too. Could I somehow arrange it to where my modem and my LAN connections work simultaneously. I could be satisfied if it were only the upload of my dialup and the download of my LAN, it doesn’t have to be combined… Any ideas?
You’re getting into tricky territory here, but it’s possible. Assuming you’re on a Windows XP (or other reasonably recent Windows) machine, go to the command line and type “route print” and hit enter. What displays is your routing table. This is the set of rules your computer uses to determine where to send IP data based on its destination. Understanding it is going to require some study on IP addressing, subnet masks, and routing in general, but the gist of it is that each line in the table is a rule that says “traffic bound for a destination matching pattern X goes to interface Y”, and then there’s the “default route” which matches all traffic that didn’t match any other rule.
Windows generally assumes you’re someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, so it sets up the routing table in a way that’s right for typical scenarios (e.g. one internet connection and maybe a local LAN). What you want is atypical, so you have to change your routing table by hand.
I’m afraid I can’t teach you how to do it, though. I’ve successfully done it on Cisco IOS and linux, but I’m not particularly good at it, and am far from an expert. I’ve never tried it on Windows other than a little tinkering, so I can’t even say whether the behavior is the same as what I’m used to. At least you know where to start looking.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done dialup, so maybe my math is off, but using your modem for your uplink isn’t going to be any faster than your LAN connection.