Larger Bandwidth

[Umbra2003]

Correct me if anything I am saying is wrong because I am here to learn. I have been reading lately about load balancing, wireless distribution systems, and bandwidth aggregation which have all peaked my interest. From what little I understand, I have gathered that you can connect your LAN to multiple ISPs and "load balance" your requests between the ISPs. The real benefit to the load balancing is for LANs which have multiple users since true bandwidth aggregation or merging of bandwidths is not possible without cooperation from your ISP. Is this true or can you "double" your bandwidth with two connections? If so, what hardware/software solutions are there out there for this?

 

[knight_runner]

There are many forms of this load balancing that you are refering too. The simplest form would be to get a mid to high end router and connect multiple paths; when you do this (depending on the routing protocol) the router will send packets to the best/fastest connection by using a cost based system and will utilize the other slower connections when needed. There are obviously more powerful systems that can determine your load needs and split packets between interfaces, or setup vlans to use one connection for half of the group of computers and the other for the other half. Cisco of course has some proprietary protocols and commands in there routers as do other companies than accomplish load balancing in different but expensive ways. Hope that helps.

 

[Umbra2003]

knight_rider--

Thanks for the reply. It does help somewhat. So lets say me and some friends want to create a wireless mesh network and we each have a ISP. Then by plugging a wireless receiver for each ISP into one of these high end routers, I could load balance all my packets from a single computer between the ISPs and effectively have a larger bandwidth?

Thanks,
Umbra

 

[knight_runner]

Well, when you talk about a mesh network that is a little different. In a mesh network all the communications nodes are connected to each other with a dedicated connection (this means lots and lots of wires for not much benefit). But lets say you have a DSL connection w/ modem, a cable connection w/ modem, and an ISDN w/ terminal connection. If you purchase a mid end router from companies like cisco then you have access to a slew of bandwidth monitoring protocols. Say for instance you know that your computer likes to stream video, you can connect your computer's NIC to a router port and tell the router to only forward to a specific outbound port (such as dsl), you can then add additional NICs and forward those as well. Some lower end consumer routers can do this as well using options. My favorite being the Linksys WRT54G with the open source firmware like dd-wrt. I use this on my home router although I have no need for some of the crazy options.