Multiple connections at the same time

[CoDrift7]

So, I have an Asus Z77 motherboard with 2 ethernet ports and I have 2 separate connections from 2 independent ISPs at my home. I have connected both my ethernet ports with my motherboard AND I have also connected my phone (4G data) via USB tethering. Individually they all provide roughly 4MBps. Is there any way I can achieve 12MBps using this setup?

[AustinProH]

You could go into the control panel and go to the networking section of it and you could bond all your connections together by selecting all your adaptors right clicking it and telling windows to Bond the connection together

[CoDrift7]

14 minutes ago, AustinProH said:

You could go into the control panel and go to the networking section of it and you could bond all your connections together by selecting all your adaptors right clicking it and telling windows to Bond the connection together

I assume you're talking about bridging? Sadly it doesnt distribute the load between the three connections

[AustinProH]

This is definitely a unique used case that’s for sure, maybe look into some sort of software that might be able to do it for you to achieve what you’re looking for. 

[Eigenvektor]

You can't combine the speed of multiple internet connections that way, at least not easily. You would need software on your end, that distributes traffic over these connections. This software would need to connect to some remote server, with software able to receive and re-combine the traffic before sending it out to the regular internet. That server would need at least 12 Mbps to be of use.

 

Regular servers do not expect traffic from the same machine to be coming in from multiple IPs and are also not set up to distribute their responses to a single machine that way.

 

What you can do much more easily would be to set up some routing rules, so that some traffic goes out through one ISP, while other traffic goes through another ISP. So e.g. you could run a download through one and receive a video stream through another. However that would most likely be a fair amount of configuration work, depending on how fine-granular you want to distribute things.

[mariushm]

Individual transfers will most likely be limited to a single connection's maximum speed.

You can configure some applications to only use a specific network card... for example let the browser default to first network card, the second network card for torrents, third network card for other programs (whattsup, messenger or to connect to a VPN)

Some download managers will allow you to specify multiple network interfaces and use multiple connections to transfer segments of the file using separate connections, but this scenario is really uncommon and right now, I couldn't give you a specific application that does it, I just remember that I experimented with this in the past.

With FTP transfers, it was beneficial, because some FTP servers had limit of connections per IP, so with 2 or more different IPs you could transfer files much faster.

 

[LapsedMemory]

There are a few router options you could add to your network that will handle this internally so your PC doesn't have to care or notice (at least with the two incoming hard-lines, not sure about the USB tethered phone).  As mariushm said, though, I believe they simply load balance between the two connections.  

 

pfSense installed on something like this:

https://smile.amazon.com/Q770G4-I225-V-Celeron-Router-Government/dp/B0B7JLWCML

 

or this may do the trick:

https://smile.amazon.com/TP-Link-Integrated-Lightening-Protection-TL-R605/dp/B08QTXNWZ1

 

[mariushm]

I was thinking more like devices like this : TL-R480T+ | Load Balance Broadband Router | TP-Link

The device in the link has 5  100 mbps ethernet ports , 1 is fixed WAN and up to 3 other ports can be configured as WAN, so you could have up to 4  outside networks (connections to ISP).

The description claims that the device also has some load balancing features as in if you're downloading something and that connection saturates one WAN connection, the device is smart enough to put new connections on other WAN ports  / networks to spread the load across multiple wan ports.

 

I think the above device is a bit outdated, because seems too cheap - I see it in a local store at around 70$ in local currency and seems too cheap for the features it claims to have and for the market it targets.

 

[CoDrift7]

On 8/31/2022 at 11:03 AM, Eigenvektor said:

You can't combine the speed of multiple internet connections that way, at least not easily. You would need software on your end, that distributes traffic over these connections. This software would need to connect to some remote server, with software able to receive and re-combine the traffic before sending it out to the regular internet. That server would need at least 12 Mbps to be of use.

 

Regular servers do not expect traffic from the same machine to be coming in from multiple IPs and are also not set up to distribute their responses to a single machine that way.

 

What you can do much more easily would be to set up some routing rules, so that some traffic goes out through one ISP, while other traffic goes through another ISP. So e.g. you could run a download through one and receive a video stream through another. However that would most likely be a fair amount of configuration work, depending on how fine-granular you want to distribute things.

Ahh I see, but wouldn't that be the case in uploading files? What if i'm downloading some steam games? I've noticed steam itself distrubutes loads onto separate connections (I've witnessed upto 8 simultaneous connections) so maybe we can divide them amongst the ISPs?

 

[CoDrift7]

On 8/31/2022 at 7:09 PM, mariushm said:

I was thinking more like devices like this : TL-R480T+ | Load Balance Broadband Router | TP-Link

The device in the link has 5  100 mbps ethernet ports , 1 is fixed WAN and up to 3 other ports can be configured as WAN, so you could have up to 4  outside networks (connections to ISP).

The description claims that the device also has some load balancing features as in if you're downloading something and that connection saturates one WAN connection, the device is smart enough to put new connections on other WAN ports  / networks to spread the load across multiple wan ports.

 

I think the above device is a bit outdated, because seems too cheap - I see it in a local store at around 70$ in local currency and seems too cheap for the features it claims to have and for the market it targets.

 

Seems too good to be true, how does it manage similar or overlapping responses from the same server over multiple ISPs?

[ToboRobot]

Network failover is easier than load balancing (and your network connections aren't really fast enough to make load balancing worthwhile).

[mariushm]

44 minutes ago, CoDrift7 said:

Seems too good to be true, how does it manage similar or overlapping responses from the same server over multiple ISPs?

I would assume once a connection is made to an IP through one wan interface, the device will keep all future connections on same wan interface for some time ... maybe after let's say 10-30 minutes, the connection between remote  ip and interface is removed from internal list.

So for example, a torrent client that connects to 100 different remote IPs to download chunks of data from a torrent, would probably have those 100 different simultaneous connections spread across multiple wan interfaces , but each connection will remain on a single wan interface (ex client downloads a chunk from one ip, the may idle for 10-20 minutes and connect again to that remote IP and request another chunk, then the device would assign that connection through the previous interface used...

If you access a single website and download multiple files from same website / domain / source IP, all transfers will be on same wan interface.

I don't have experience with that particular device, and didn't even read documentation, so I don't know, I can only imagine the easiest way to accomplish it.

[Eigenvektor]

3 hours ago, CoDrift7 said:

Ahh I see, but wouldn't that be the case in uploading files? What if i'm downloading some steam games? I've noticed steam itself distrubutes loads onto separate connections (I've witnessed upto 8 simultaneous connections) so maybe we can divide them amongst the ISPs?

If you know the IP addresses that Steam will download from, then you could set up routing rules to send connections to specific IPs through a specific ISP. However it looks like they are the same destination IP (for downloads at least).

 

The question would be if these servers accept connections from anyone, or whether they require authentication. The authentication is most likely bound to your IP you made the connection to Steam's authentication server from when you first started Steam. So connections through other ISPs might fail to authenticate.

 

The other issue is that you probably can't influence the download servers it picks. If they get picked semi-randomly, you could run into a case where all of these servers are routed through the same ISP. You could potentially set up a rule where a connection to any know Steam-IP is distributed round-robin (i.e. first connection goes through ISP1, second connection ISP3, third ISP3, fourth ISP1, …)

[Alex Atkin UK]

5 hours ago, ToboRobot said:

Network failover is easier than load balancing (and your network connections aren't really fast enough to make load balancing worthwhile).

Strongly disagree, its actually MORE worthwhile if the connection is small.

 

Loading your average web page if the media is spread two different WANs it can make a dramatic difference in page load times.

 

2 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

The other issue is that you probably can't influence the download servers it picks. If they get picked semi-randomly, you could run into a case where all of these servers are routed through the same ISP. You could potentially set up a rule where a connection to any know Steam-IP is distributed round-robin (i.e. first connection goes through ISP1, second connection ISP3, third ISP3, fourth ISP1, …)

Steam scales extremely well in my experience when done at the router.  I run all my normal traffic down my FTTP but have policy routing for Steam servers that load balances that traffic, regularly maxing my 5G backup and FTTP at the same time.

 

When not using a router, the easiest way AFAIK is https://speedify.com/

[wseaton]

You can't combine different ISPs into a single aggragate connection, at least on connections most of us have available. Basically you are creating a VLAN across two different connections, and you need an end point at both sides to load balance. Data has to be split, transmitted, and then put back together on the client. You can only imagine how SSL would try to navigate this. Pretty sure it would have to be at layer 3 because protocols that can't be fragmented would not like this.

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I have seen this done with single ISPs who keep multiple lines to clients for redundancy, but its not as hard given they are splitting the traffic on their end and putting it back together on their hosted client.

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