ADSL bonding and internet sharing

Hi all

have some plans to improve my internet connection. i live in deepest darkest Kent so my internet is poor. i currently have 2 adsl lines coming into the house. on a couple of the PC's i have speedify which bonds these lines together and works really well, however i cant share that bonded connection around the house - ie to other pc's and my Nvidia shield TVetc.

I am considering getting another 1 or 2 lines run to the house and here comes the crux of my question. if i got a 4 port NIC installed on my old HP n54l and ran all 4 lines into it, with another NIC could i then share out this bonded connection to the rest of my network? And if so how? would i need to run the HP server with a dhcp program or would internet sharing suffice? also how would this work with the Shield TV?

Obviously i want to have an idea this will work before i shell out on further lines. Hope that makes sense. any thoughts greatly received.

James

Wow. no ideas anyone?

Well how about this. can i make my little server into a dhcp machine for the whole house? and if so how?

I don’t know of any consumer equipment that allows you to bond 4 ADSL lines together - but you could load share the 4 connections among the computers you have but it wouldn’t increase the overall speed.

Most Linux distributions have a DHCP server application available so if your server is *nix based, that would be fairly easy. The most common seems to be isc-dhcp, but searching through the repository for your Linux distribution will find the one for your system. If your server isn't Linux (or OSX) based, then I dont know what is available. Windows server may have one built in, but not something I have ever used.

I have no idea how ADSL bonding works. But presumably you can set up your PC to be a web proxy for the rest of the house though something like CCProxy or winGate.

A quick google strongly implies that to get the aggregated bandwidth like you want requires control at both ends of the bond* - i.e. you'd need to get the bonded connection from your ISP, who would undoubtedly charge you (through the nose, I suspect).

As peter says, you could use a linux box to bond multiple ports for failover or load balancing (i.e. traffic to different hosts uses different interfaces) which may help if you've got a situation where several different devices are attempting to access several different types of content (e.g. different streaming services, or a large download and streaming video). Each connection would be limited to the peak bandwidth of one ADSL line, but you'd get more bandwidth to share between devices...

*edit: it looks like Speedify uses parallel VPN links to provide a single endpoint, which is why you don't need ISP involvement to use it. According to their support pages you can combine Speedify for Team with Connectify Hotspot MAX to bond and share multiple lines (i.e. one Windows/Windows Server computer runs Speedify to bond the lines and Hotspot Max to share the bonded connection).

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

A quick google strongly implies that to get the aggregated bandwidth like you want requires control at both ends of the bond - i.e. you'd need to get the bonded connection from your ISP, who would undoubtedly charge you (through the nose, I suspect).

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Yes, its not just the consumer end where bonding takes place, it has to be at both ends. If you have a pair of bonded ADSL lines from your ISP it might be worth talking to them to see if they can aggregate more - but you will need a copper pair for each ADSL line so the line rental charges will go up proportionally - and that's before the ADS charges are added. At that sort of price you might be better off looking at satellite provision or (depending on your cellphone coverage) looking at 4G connectivity.

I've just had a quick play with speedify (on a Windows server VM), and it looks like it automatically creates a virtual adapter when it installs. So in fact you should be able to use Windows' built in internet connection sharing to share the speedify connection. You'll probably need to invest in a wireless access point (and maybe a switch if you also want to share a wired connection), but it should be possible. Worth having a play with, I'd've thought, if you're already paying for speedify...

A&A say they support bonding, and I wouldn't want to try this without support from the ISP.

https://www.aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-bonding.html

Thank you guys for all your thoughts . It's useful currently for downloading large files for my work, but unfortunately netflix have banned the vpn that speedify uses which is a shame for people who (like me) use a vpn for a legitimate reason.

If you do go talking to someone like A&A about bonding, be sure to ask if a single client can expect to see improved download speed. There are different ways of combining network connections and in some cases it needs multiple connections and/or clients to get better overall throughput. A&A are supposed to be very good, but for consumer broadband they are a bit expensive.