Bandwidth Aggregation and Conglomeration

rico snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com (Rico) hath wroth:

There's a really long old story behind COMIX. In a previous life, I sold and supported SCO Xenix and Unix. Although Microsloth started Xenix somewhat before PCDOS/MSDOS, they sold most of the rights to SCO when IBM appeared on the scene and wanted PCDOS.

Fast forward many years, and we have one of the numerous battles in the Unix wars. The one that inspired COMIX was when AT&T invested in Sun Microsystems, and precipitated a revolt among Unix license holders, who claimed that Sun would get preferential treatment in Unix releases. I'll spare you the details. I saw this as an opportunity to establish a competing organization, where I would sell membership subscriptions for exorbitant amounts. That's where the "independent" came from. Absolutely nobody was interested and the idea died. I missed the chance to register the domain somewhat later, but the idea was dead by then. I also had a background in publishing pornographic comic books while going to skool, which somewhat inspired the acronym.

"Pierre" hath wroth:

Dunno about Novell. Officially, it's called "channel bonding multilink" and is supported by Windoze for dialup and ISDN. With broadband, it's "multi-homing". However, these require support from the ISP to bond the two data channels to a single IP address. This is very commonly done with IDSN, where two 64Kbit/sec B1 channels are combined into a single 128Kbit/sec channel. With multiple different service providers, that isn't going to work. I read that multi-homing DSL is commonly offered by UK ISP's, but not in the US.

Another way to do it is with a load balancing router:

Are US Telco's "Sharing,caring people"?

B. ISPs can restrict WiBoost so it allows connections only between nodes of the ISP's choosing (such as the ISP's own customers or customers who pay an additional charge).

David Taylor hath wroth:

True. That also works for BitTorrent outgoing bandwidth. The system will open as many streams as it thinks is necessary to saturate the bandwidth in both directions. That's both outgoing and incoming. The server could limit the number of streams per IP, but that won't work if the load balancing router offers requests from multiple ISP's, each with it's own IP address. Install one of these wi-fi bandwidth conglomerators and you can easily hog all of the bandwidth in the entire neighborhood both in and out. Oh, did I say "hog"? I mean't "share". Hmmm, I didn't see any mention of QoS or bandwidth management in either web pile.

I used a program by MidCore for a long time on two 56k modems. It works with two dsl or cable or any connection combinations you can dream up too. Browser asked from proxy cache. Everything downloaded into a proxy. Smart enough to basically round robbin and attempt to keep all connections busy. Set file split size minimum to starting at x bites and it reassembled in the cache seeming instantly. But only worked downloading. You could pick and choose which connection to upload easy enough if you didn't want to specifically use the first or next avail. They priced themselves out of a job... was too pricey. You can make one yourself with a bit of imagination,, proxy and download accelerator.

I suspect a lot of people are like me, I'm reasonably satisfied with my downstream side (of course more would be better) it is upstream bandwidth that is in short supply IMO at least on my connection. I'm on BS's best tier for my are and the upstream promise is 385 (actually get a bit less, DSL you know). So in my opinion without a boost in the upstream side, not worth the bother. But that is me.

"Organization: Committee to Maintain an Independent Xenix" Thought MS owned this?

fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.

Unless you're using a download manager that spawns multiple connections and the host accepts them, then it works.

David.

If you are hoping to be able to download a single file faster - no. The host you are downloading to knows about one IP address, but not about the second [,third, fourth], and therefore can't shovel it down all of the pipes at the same time.

If you are downloading multiple files (or otherwise using the Internet in separate streams/applications/functions), this _MAY_ increase your effective bandwidth. You would appear to the world to be two (or more) separate computers that have no relation to each other.

I'm not exactly sure that would be the case. Technically, there is going to be limitations in bandwidth somewhere along the chain from A to B, but that's true of any connection.

Of course. ;-)

I suspect this depends on how things are done.

Likewise. Sharing of multiple streams of traffic (downloading a web page that itself has dozens of items of eye-candy can be downloaded in parallel without the ISP knowing.

Ten years ago... January 1996?

1990 The PPP Multilink Protocol (MP). K. Sklower, B. Lloyd, G. McGregor, D. Carr, T. Coradetti. August 1996. (Format: TXT=53271 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC1717) (Status: DRAFT STANDARD)

Yup - looks like the protocol was there then.

I suspect you are thinking about what they were calling Shotgun Modems, which were two independent modems on a single card (though you could do this with a lot of extra effort with individual cards/externals). I'm not sure what the limitation is on the number of modems than can be "joined" this way. By the same token, there was also a sharing mode in ISDN where you could combine channels to gain extra bandwidth.

The minor problem with Multilink is that the peers have to support this capability and you bet your bippy that they charge for this feature. But this allow you to increase the download rate of a single stream - a file transfer rate, because the stream is only divided between the ISP and you. The other method - where you are sharing connections (which may or may not even be to the same ISP) doesn't require that the ISP does anything, but only works where you are downloading in parallel streams (that is, not dragging a single file). Jeff, you may want to review the Linux Adv-Routing-HOWTO document.

Old guy

Did not Novell have a similar product in their internet connection offerings some 10 odd years ago? It was a two channel link and was a way of effectively getting twice the thruput on a dialup system (pre DSL). The principle is not new.

Peter

I used to in the dark ages support a Real World installation (forget which modules now, but basic accounting stuff for medical offices). System was Xenix on an old AST 386-25 with several users via a digiboard. Way cool in its day.

fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.