Thread: Easiest way to take advantage of multiple internet connections?

Well my situation is, at my apartment I have my both my own internet, as well as access to free wifi offered for my apartments,

Trying to figure out if there is anyway I could use both of them, effectively doubling my speed (they are both 6mbps), for downloading or uploading large files.

Some googling found a few sketchy forum posts hinting at how it may be possible to use load balancing in windows 7 to use multiple adapters at once, but nothing definitive saying for sure how it worked, or even if it worked. And my own fooling around with showed that it didn't.



I know I could do something like split the file in two with rars, run a separate instance of windows in a virtual machine, tie one adapter to my windows, one to the virtual system, and download one part in each.. but that seems kinda overkill (and troublesome) to achieve my goal. And I don't have two PCs, just my desktop and my ipad, and as far as I can tell, ipad is pretty much useless for uploading or downloading files via ftp or torrent.

Well you can multiplex the connections, although it can be difficult if they aren't symmetrical and/or you aren't using a bonding device, typically a channel bonding modem. This is a complex topic and really not for the faint of heart. Suffice it to say that you're better off running separate tasks on a second machine, real or virtual if you want to take advantage of that second connection.

If you truly want to bond channels for better bandwidth, then there are providers and equipment that specialize in that. Usually you'd want to same spec pathways from the same vendor to go in that direction.

use either untangled box linux distro,, zeroshell linux distro, or use pfsense a FreeBSD distro, on another box with a multiple NIC's (Network Interface Cards). Those are really the only viable options. Unless you would like to buy a nice dual-wan router such as a Cisco RV042, I have one and I love it. Linux and BSD OSes are really the only operating systems that can do load balancing or fail-over properly. Trust me, I am a Linux Admin and all around admin for my company. Windows is not stable only, nor robust enough for the task. I can't even get the windows servers to do it properly without a linux box in front of them pulling the connections together. I will be building a zeroshell box soon for my company. And down the road Iwant to add a second 30Mbps line with 5 Mbps up, and will build myself a zeroshell box, with a DNS cache server, apt-get cache server, seedbox, and more. (in seperate boxes of course)