Use 2 internet connections at same time?

[FalseControl]

So I have two networks at home. One for work since I work from home and I can't get a higher connection. I already have the fastest speed I can get sadly and its just meh. I have a second connection for the rest of the house so my work doesn't get slowed down when someone watches Netflix or streaming something and it stays on the separate connection. Is there some way to utilize both connection at once from a single PC. I looked into a program called speedify but I also saw it had a high ping and was a VPN and I am not really looking for a VPN. Ideas? Thoughts on if its even sensible to do? 

 

Side note I am hardwired in to my PC and I have a wifi/bluetooth card as well so I do have a way to connect both internet connections

[Poet129]

18 minutes ago, FalseControl said:

So I have two networks at home. One for work since I work from home and I can't get a higher connection. I already have the fastest speed I can get sadly and its just meh. I have a second connection for the rest of the house so my work doesn't get slowed down when someone watches Netflix or streaming something and it stays on the separate connection. Is there some way to utilize both connection at once from a single PC. I looked into a program called speedify but I also saw it had a high ping and was a VPN and I am not really looking for a VPN. Ideas? Thoughts on if its even sensible to do? 

 

Side note I am hardwired in to my PC and I have a wifi/bluetooth card as well so I do have a way to connect both internet connections

This program works well for me, it requires no outside source (vpn) of any kind. However needs some additional setup. GitHub

[Windows7ge]

Has it been done? Yes.

 

 

Is it practical to implement for a home user? Not really. And it has it's short comings.

 

I'd opt to keep the two connections independent and just find a means to distribute a workload across them similar to what you're doing now.

[BobVonBob]

You need something to do channel bonding and/or load balancing. Speedify is one option, but there are others.

https://cordcutting.com/isp/channel-bonding/

 

Keep in mind that your latency will be limited by the latency of the worst connection you're using, and that any channel bonding method is going to add some latency of its own. If either of those are dealbreakers, I'd say just keep using a single connection.

[wseaton]

Without having symmetrical connections channel bonding is a terrible idea, if its even possible. Differences in latency, etc. 

 

Load balancing is increasingly common in consumer level routers. Typically its used for failover where you have a wireless Hotspot plugged into a secondary interface as your main internet connection and if your main internet fails your router flips the connection seamlessly to the backup. With 5G slowly crawling out this is increasingly common for small and medium sized businesses. 

 

Load balancing though just gives you one internet connection at a time. Typically one will be much faster than the other so it doesn't matter. What we need are smarter consumer family routers where dad can easily traffic shape his priority traffic over the kids

[FalseControl]

14 hours ago, wseaton said:

Without having symmetrical connections channel bonding is a terrible idea, if its even possible. Differences in latency, etc. 

 

Load balancing is increasingly common in consumer level routers. Typically its used for failover where you have a wireless Hotspot plugged into a secondary interface as your main internet connection and if your main internet fails your router flips the connection seamlessly to the backup. With 5G slowly crawling out this is increasingly common for small and medium sized businesses. 

 

Load balancing though just gives you one internet connection at a time. Typically one will be much faster than the other so it doesn't matter. What we need are smarter consumer family routers where dad can easily traffic shape his priority traffic over the kids

lol that would be nice to do

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 2/8/2022 at 6:38 AM, wseaton said:

Load balancing though just gives you one internet connection at a time. Typically one will be much faster than the other so it doesn't matter. What we need are smarter consumer family routers where dad can easily traffic shape his priority traffic over the kids

That would be failover, not load balancing, the clue being in the name.  Load balancing does just that, it sends different streams down different WANs, "balancing" the load.

With my current setup I make extensive use of policy routing.  Games consoles on 5G, some sites routed over specific links, with failover for anything not with a specific policy applied.

[FalseControl]

14 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

That would be failover, not load balancing, the clue being in the name.  Load balancing does just that, it sends different streams down different WANs, "balancing" the load.

With my current setup I make extensive use of policy routing.  Games consoles on 5G, some sites routed over specific links, with failover for anything not with a specific policy applied.

How did you do that if you don't mind me asking?

[Alex Atkin UK]

31 minutes ago, FalseControl said:

How did you do that if you don't mind me asking?

One of these running pfSense.