GIGABYTE AORUS XTREME X570 Aggregate connection help

[GM Rod]

Hey guys!
I have two connections here from separate providers, and my motherboard has two ethernet ports.
Each one is connected to a different service (TalkTalk and Virgin).
There's a way to combine these connections, right? Load balancing in-PC?
I found this app called Speedify but it's not free.
There has to be a way to do this for free, right?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Do you want a single connection to be faster? If you do, speedify and simmilar are your only option here. 

 

If you want multiple transfers to be faster, you typically want your router to do this, but you could run a virtual router in a vm or set different apps to use different connections.

[GM Rod]

So.
I only have two connections right now, because I'm transitioning between providers and I haven't canceled the "old" one yet.

So in the meantime, I thought I'd try and see how to make this work just to see if it's effective or not.

 

The goal would be to have ONE connection that's faster, yes.
But, I'd settle for something like:

One connection could be dedicated to say, a stream. So it'd handle the stream itself, music I'd be playing, any browser sources etc.
The other one would be exclusively used by whatever game I'm playing, for example.

Just an opportunity to see if this can be done on just one PC that happens to have a dual-NIC motherboard.

[GM Rod]

Anyone else chime in?

[Lurick]

55 minutes ago, GM Rod said:

Anyone else chime in?

Unfortunately not with Windows, at least not free or easily.

You cannot get a single connection to be combined across multiple links like that especially across different providers unless you're doing some really fancy SD-WAN stuff (hundreds of thousands of dollars) and even then it's iffy depending on the application.

[GM Rod]

Oof.
I guess that's the "no" then.

Good to know!
So if I wanted to actually do this, I'd need a load-balancing router, right.

Just for science. I saw Ubiquiti has a £79 one that does it.

It's cheap cuz no WiFi (which makes sense).

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, GM Rod said:

Oof.
I guess that's the "no" then.

Good to know!
So if I wanted to actually do this, I'd need a load-balancing router, right.

Just for science. I saw Ubiquiti has a £79 one that does it.

It's cheap cuz no WiFi (which makes sense).

Even then it's going to load balance connections and not bond them.

It would still work though and although I haven't messed with it or checked too much into it I would see if you could at least do application load balancing with it or if it's just balance all traffic per flow at will based on link usage.

[GM Rod]

Ohh.

I get what you mean now.

Hmm I don't think a router would be able to get information from the PC via ethernet about which application to use for what connection, would it?
Like it'd need to also be connected to said PC via USB for something like this, I'd presume.
And definitely not for £79.

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 3/10/2024 at 8:53 PM, GM Rod said:

So in the meantime, I thought I'd try and see how to make this work just to see if it's effective or not.

Its extremely effective for game downloads when done at the router.  However its also tricky, so I use it for Steam right now as its easy to get their list of IP addresses to tell my router to assign downloads across both connections.  I play no Steam games online so it doesn't matter if my IP switches.

 

You can just load balance everything, but this can come with its own caveats such as triggering captchas more often or some websites triggering security alerts, due to your IP address constantly changing.  Also online gaming traffic potentially having problems.

 

This is where Speedify comes in, as it takes traffic from both connections and combines them into a single connection at their-end, making it seamless.  But this also is probably not ideal for gaming as it can cause latency due to waiting for out-of-order packets to combine, as naturally when there are two different connections then the traffic isn't arriving in-order, it has to be buffered and recombined