ADSL USB modem query

[Cyrus]

I heard from a friend of mine that a PC can have multiple USB ADSL modems at once. Correct?

Consider it is.
Will the system use all the modems' bandwidth simultaneously or just route to the less loaded one? In other word, will the total bandwith be the sum of all connections' or still limited by the maximum of each?

If one of the modems suddenly fails, what will happen to the connection which use the modem? Will it reroute to the other one or disconnected too?


My background is I'm planning on having a gateway for my net-cafe which's gonna use a new ADSL product. And after some considerations the choice of using multiple modems has many more benefits than the drawbacks.

Btw, in term of capability, stability and hardware reliability, can a laptop be used as a gateway server? Also can its PSU hold the power consumption of many USB modems?


Thanks in advance.

 

[folken]

The modems don't have to be usb. You could have more than one of any modem. I actually would advise not getting usb modems, they suck
If you want to actually get say 2 1.5mb dsl connections you would need to have 2 phone lines and pay for service on each phone line. Then have one modem on each line.
With a multiple modem setup you would have lots of options. Routing different services through different connections (Can be done in windows, linux, and with fancy network hardware). Making one a failover (I think windows can do this, linux, fancy network hardware). Making one a spillover (Windows, linux, fancy network hardware). Making them load balanced (fany scripts in linux, extremely fancy network hardware).

A laptop would make a great gateway router. It is small, quiet, and doesn't consume much power. I highly recommend using ethernet modems and network cards and putting a linux distro on it. Distros like clarkconnect, ipcop, smoothwall, etc make a much better gateway/router than windows and are much easier install and maintain than openbsd or unix.

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[upec]

Hi Folken. I have both cable modem and ADSL at home. I am using Linux to load balancing my traffic. Currently my configuration for Load Balancing is not working too well over 2 different ISP(I prefer 2 different ISP for higher availability). I am not really satisfied with the result. I would love to learn more about load balancing. Is there any good web site you can recommend to me? Thanks a lot.

 

[Cyrus]

I never use ADSL before, so can you tell me why USB modem sucks? All I know are the USB version's cheaper then the ethernet one and doesn't use power adaptor.

I would like to know too if there is any good website for setting up a gateway using any Linux distro. ^^

 

[folken]

I always had a problem with usb modems initilizing. I would always end up having to reboot my computer several times to get them to turn on. Once they were on they were always dropping their connection, the only way to get it back was to reboot the computer. Newer ones might be different but I don't know. Last I heard linux isn't to friendly with most usb modems too

Usually the best resource for distro info is on the distro's website. Pick one that would suite your needs and read up on it on the website. That is one great thing about linux, there are always manuals for everything and they are always very detailed
I would definatly start with one of the router distros. They will get your machine up and running in no time flat. If you feel like getting a little more involved in linux later go for a regular distro like suse or redhat and make it into a router yourself.

As for load balancing I ohnestly have never been able to do it myself. Not that I failed at doing it but that I have never had 2 internet connections to try it on. From what I understand though it isn't exactly what you would think at first. Usually you think that if you have 2 1.5mb connections you will get 1 3mb connection. That is not exactly the case. If you start a download it will not use all 3mb, it will be limited to 1.5mb. But if you start another download or surf the web or something it will go out the other connection so it too will get 1.5mb. I believe the more apropriate term is multiplexing. Putting that into google got lots of hits, lol. Searching for Multiplexing internet connections should turn up some useful results.

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