two Internet connections

I posted a similar posting earlier and I checked the newsgroup several hours later, but it did not appear. So I am posting again, just in case.

Hello to everyone in this newsgroup,

I have a question and I hope someone can reply. I have one wired Internet connection from a 1MB/s ADSL. I can also access my neighbour's wireless Internet connection because I have a wireless LAN card. I believe his ADSL connection is about 768KB/sec.

Anyway, although I can have 2 Internet connections, I do not find my downloads any faster than using my own wired Internet connection. With the two connections, I was hoping that my downloads will be significantly faster because there's more bandwidth, in my opinion.

Can anyone tell me whether I can make my downloads faster and how?

Thank you.

Kingsley

Reply to
kingsley.yong
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You should check the legality of using your neighbors's connection, or whether sharing it is contrary to his agreement with his ISP.

Yes, but you will have to find routing software capable of using both connections to fetch pages or graphics. Some monolithic things (like long text pages) will not fetch any faster, while things with lots of ads and photos from different image servers might be parallelizable.

-- Robert

Reply to
Robert Redelmeier

You might want to look at "load balancing", by default your computer will only use one network connection at a time. P.S., see the other posts about the legality/morality of using your neighbor's internet.

Reply to
Kay Archer

I hope you have your neighbor's permission to use his connection.

Any single download will make use of only one of those links. If you are downloading two files concurrently, you could arrange for one per link (with care and the right equipment).

Reply to
Neil W Rickert

After reading the replies here, I did a search for "load balancing" in Google, but I am no closer to finding an answer.

Is there any shareware or freeware that can accomplish this "load balancing" or ability to aggregate the two Internet connections together to achieve a faster download rate?

Kingsley

Reply to
kingsley.yong

As a first step, you might visit dslreport.com, go to the tools section and test your link speed(s) to see if you are doing as well as you could expect from the available bandwidth. If not, they have some other tools to help figure out why.

If you really want to experiment with load-balancing, you could try OpenBSD running on a spare PC. The spare need not be powerful at all; quiet and cool running and reliable is more like it. This is no small project for a novice and I would not suggest it if you don't have any Unix experience. But it has everything you would need to load-balance two WAN connections in either or both directions, along with excellent firewall capabilities. You can make a page like

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pop up noticeably faster. Two users sharing your load-balanced conection would feel less impact from the other. And I think that bit-torrent would get the full benefit too. But in the most common case, a single file download from some site .... you will not see any benefit because only one connection will be active - and it may not even be the faster one.

Reply to
George Pontis

cnet (aka: download.com) seems to have some "free to try" progams.

Here is one:

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Reply to
Kay Archer

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Reply to
JimK

You need nics and a driver that support "teamed nics". Do a search on "teamed nics".

-Frank

Reply to
Frankster

I don't believe that teaming would be useful. The closest WAN equivalent would be BGP, but even that only works with ISP support, which will not be available. The best the OP can hope for is a box that can load balance outgoing connections. Even this would not make a download from a sinlge site go faster. It _would_ make many pages load faster, specifically pages that have multiple links that need to be obtained separately. A good example of that would be

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The OP would also benefit if more than one person on his LAN was using the internet at the same time.

As for hardware to do this, some sort of external load balancing box is needed. Possibly a Linux or BSD machine could provide the functionality, or for about $100 there is something on the market specifically to do this. Sorry I don't remember the brand. I suggest searching for "load balancing" and WAN.

Reply to
George Pontis

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