Suppose you live with three other people and all of you have your own broadband access (~2mbs). So there’s, supposedly, 8mbs available to the house, but each individual connection is capped at 2.
What would be the best way of combining the connections so it ended up being like 4 people sharing an 8mbs connection? Or X number of people sharing a Y speed connection?
Running Cat-5 all over the house is generally not preferred, and they each already have a wireless router from their providers. They’ve tried bridging the connections in software on the individual computers, but that’s had problems with load balancing (I.E. they’d all dig in to one connection and use the others only as back-ups).
Currently, they’re thinking of setting up a single box to connect to the 4 seperate connections and then offer the combined bandwidth on a sperate (802.11g, probably) connection. Ideally the box would act like a hardware firewall and spread the load accross the connections (and maybe do some accounting so whoever used it most paid the most).
Thing is, though we all have an intuitive idea that this is (or should be) possible, we’re not sure what sort of software they’d need to make it work. Still theoretical, so they don’t have any hardware or OS restrictions…
What do they need?
Someone with more knowledge than I will probably be along soon, but I don’t think this is possible. You could set it up with some kind of switching network, so that each computer could select which connection to use, but bridging the internet sources together would not work.
Think of it like trying to set four telephones up to share four different phone lines. Each phone can select any one of the four lines (as long as you have a 4-line phone), and you can have multiple people talking on the same line, but you can’t have one phone attempting to access all four lines at once.
Just like phone lines each have their own unique phone number, each of your internet connections has a unique IP address, and you can’t blend them together.
I think it could probably be done; it’s just a routing issue, after all; I’m not sure if you’d find any off-the-shelf solution for it though.
However; there are a couple of incidental reasons it might not work:
Bandwidth of the local loop: You might all have different telephone lines, but how are these delivered to the house? - If there’s any kind of multiplexing going on and they are being delivered down a single cable, then you’d probably hit a limit before you got anywhere near your 8mbps.
Contention ratio at the local switch; I’m not sure what kind of setup is common in your locality, but over here, broadband is most commonly offered in a contended setup - you don’t exactly share the connection, but if traffic is high, your bandwidth will be reduced. Typical contention ratios here are 20:1 for business and as high as 50:1 for residential. If you have a contended connection, you’d all be competing for a share of the same bandwidth once you get past the local loop.
It’s called Connection Teaming, or sometimes Multi-Homing. They used to make routers with multiple WAN ports that would do this for you, but I haven’t seen any in some time…
(5 minutes later, after furiously Googling)
… looks there are still a few out there, although I only see Dual WAN ports, not four. You may have better luck now that you know what to search for.
I’ve done this in a slightly different manner with ISDN, but that was the norm for that type of connection. Haven’t tried it with DSL. Keep in mind that 4x the lines may not mean 4x the bandwidth.
Thanks for the links, but from the cheapness angle, they’re looking at buying some vanilla ethernet and/or wireless cards and sticking them all in one box. Then all the fancy stuff happens in software.
Ideally, I think they’d like to do it all wirelessly, but I don’t know how well that will work out with that many different signals in one house. Seems like it could be a problem, but wireless is pretty much voodoo to me.
I’ll pass along the stand-alone dual WAN routers, but I doubt they’ll work from a price/feature/upgrade standpoint. The fact that the closest I’ve gotten to a price on four-port routers is “call for consultation” doesn’t give me warm fuzzies. There is still the wire phobia, too.
Berkut mentions a Linux machine and some network cards. That’s what they’re talking about. What sort of software would you recommend?
Dewey, I get the impression you haven’t lived with multiple roommates for a while. What happens on the random day that they’re all home and online? Anyone on that type of network that must not be named and the others might as well go read a book. And let’s all imagine for a moment all four of them trying to play World of Warcraft simultaneously. Tragedy of the commons and all that.
Anyway, it’s more a matter of a four port router not being terribly useful for anything other than being a four port router. For the same cost you could build a computer that could also function as a fileshare, or a game server, or whatever. It’s also easier to give everyone back their specific pieces of donated hardware when they move out rather than figure out who gets the four port router.
