India Broadband Forum

cooljat

Hi all,

Am just curious, is it possible to bridge 2 seprate broadband connections together?? like I've 2 connections one from BSNL n one from Reliance!!

How can I use both of them together for better speed & fail-over??


awaiting for ur valuable suggestions!

thx!!


Rock on
Jit

whitestar_999

no!you can only use 1 connection at a time for sending & receiving data.at best you can use virtualisation softwares like VMWare to run both connections simultaneously on 2 different XP's on same computer at same time but this is complicated & very resource heavy.

gettarun

Yes, you can use both your broadband connections in load balance / fail over configurations using a dual WAN load balance router such as DLink's DI-LB604 which comes with two WAN interfaces and four LAN ports (all ports are RJ-45). The Ethernet port on the BSNL ADSL modem be connected to router's WAN1 interface and the Ethernet port on Reliance ADSL modem be connected to router's WAN2 interface. The ADSL modems be configured for 'bridge' mode and the router WAN interfaces for 'PPPoE' connection. Router configuration has a button for load balance configuration.

whitestar_999

load balance will not increase the bandwidth by adding the individual bandwidths of 2 connections.load balancing simply provides a way to remain connected even if 1 connection fails.

skap

no whitestar, load balance helps you in providing increased bandwidth and good performance provided that you need to configure your router in such a way that it define and split the traffic in each interface. say like routing torrent traffic in one interface and internet & general traffic in another traffic really helps you in enjoying good bandwidth

whitestar_999

@skap,what you are saying is true but not entirely.first of all to get any improvements in speeds you must have load balancing set between 2 connections of same IP provider.2nd no amount of load balancing can actually give you combined bandwidth of 2 connections & this is true especially for http/ftp connections.
even splitting traffic is not possible for windows because to do that you have to edit IP/routing tables which can only be done in Linux as you can see that the user who posted the above question was also using linux because he mentioned editing routing tables which is not possible in windows.router don't configure traffic but editing routing tables do to use,say,some packets using one connection & some another.

skap

Thanks whitestar.

Yeah i agree that its practically impossible to get combined bandwidth, i too mentioned that it provides an increased bandwidth only and not double.

I cant understand why do we need from same service provider? because one of the reason to go for load balancing is to gain latency to the connection even when one service provider is gone/disconnected. say incase if we subscribe to same service provider and some problem in junction box(distribution point), ultimately both connections going to be affected and no use in using two connections.
If we have services from two different service provider, this is not the case.

? We can also edit routing tables in windows using 'route' command. we can define that this destination IP to be routed through this interface and gateway. But we cant define the traffic type. for that we need third party.

why do we need 3 cards here?

can you help me in understanding this, sorry that am not able to understand this by myself

I also suggest that always use router for routing traffic and not any computers (which ever linux or windows). because routers are one that are made and built primarily to do routing job so all considerations are taken while manufacturing (processor/ram/rom). But system as router, we defintely cant except the same speed and it is a kind of additional job for them.

whitestar_999

if you click on properties of any dsl/adsl connection & then click on networking tab you will see a settings tab for pppoe.clicking on it will bring the ppp settings window in which there is an option"negotiate multi link for single link connections".this is the setting which if provided by an ISP provider will enable user to send & receive packets from individual links through the ISP provider as a single connection.that is why this will work only for 2 connections from a same ISP provider.

because of the reason above.if the connections are from different service providers we need 2 different NIC's to define various rules for forwarding packets through different gateways/NIC's.in this case we can't use option"negotiate multi link for single link connections".

all http/ftp links established connections based on the incoming packet's IP address & even if load balancing is in place it can not send packets all with same IP address even if they are forwarded using both connections & that is why the http/ftp server will only accept connection from one of the IP address even if the packets for those IP address are forwarded through both connections.

editing routing tables is indeed possible in windows but i think it is available only for PRO edition & windows server.also XP don't work as effectively with edited routing tables as linus does so most of the users either use windows server or linux or router/modem instead of editing tables in XP.

skap

yeah, i accept "negotiate multi link for single link connections" option helps to provide bandwidth aggregation. but i am talking about the service failure. if we use same service provider and if it fails, we are halted.

whitestar_999

that is why you can either get redundancy(by using different service providers) or increased bandwidth by combining 2 preferably similar connections from same ISP provider(like 2 256kbps) & that is why home users mostly opt for 2nd option thus choosing increased bandwidth.usually business users opt for 1st option for redundancy.anyway load balancing routers are currently not available in India & you have to bought/bring them from abroad as far as i know.also there is no point in using load balancing in India for home customers if you are going to use 2 256/512kbps connections.abroad people generally use load balancing routers for combining,say,2 8mbps or higher connections from same provider.