Theory: aggregate bandwidth with multiple cable modems

Archived from groups: alt.comp.networking.connectivity (More info?)

"clickhere" <dougbrunelle@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1104732324.233054.287600@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> SuperCable!
>
> This concept has probably already been thought of, but I was wondering
> if any of you know if this has actually been tried.
>
> First, a little background:
>
> I've noticed that in the past year, the max speed of my cable Internet
> connection has gone down- probably the result of my cable provider
> (Cox) throttling individual connections. I used to get between 350
> KB/sec and 400 KB/sec on many downloads, but these days, I'm getting
> maximum speeds of about 220 KB/sec. Let's round it off and say that I
> have 2,000 Kb (Kilobits) of bandwidth on my downstream connection,
> whereas before, I was getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,500 -
> 4,000 Kbits. I don't actually KNOW if Cox is doing this, but I suspect
> it, and my reduction in download speeds is a clue. Plus, I saw this
> article:
> http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/oct02/oct02-2.html
> PLUS, I read on the Cox website that they have a "Premium" high-speed
> Internet service available, at *twice* the cost of the regular one.
> They say that it's available by only making a small "administrative
> change" to the account. (Yeah, taking off the bandwidth throttling, no
> doubt!)
>
> What gets me is, I'm still paying the same amount of money for much
> less bandwidth than I used to have! Has nobody complained about this?
>
> Which got me to thinking. In the old days, some of us would get two
> analog (POTS) phone lines and two modems, and attach them to our PC and
> dial up our favorite BBS, to get an aggregate bandwidth of 2x what we'd
> get with one modem/phone line. And later, when I used ISDN, the two
> 64-Kbit 'B' channels were added together to get 128 Kbits.
>
> Seems to me that the same thing would be possible by aggregating cable
> modem connections.
>
> I'm in a townhouse complex, where there are 57 units. There is one
> incoming main cable from Cox, which is split off to give (n) cable
> TV/Internet connections to the units. Let's say that there are 10 Cox
> customers here who subscribe to their cable Internet service. That's 10
> x 2,000 Kb per connection = 20,000 Kbits aggregate bandwidth for the
> data streams coming down. But, there's probably only a few people using
> their Internet connection at any given time.
>
> I'm theorizing, but I would think that we could have a LAN in the
> complex which would tap into all units that have a cable modem,
> aggregating the bandwidth, so that this aggregated bandwidth could be
> shared among the number of connections actually being used. We would
> all get better bandwidth value for our money.
>
> For example, if there were 4 out of the 10 subscribers online at a
> given time, the 4 would share the 20,000 Kb aggregate connection,
> giving each of the four connections 20,000 / 4 = 5,000 Kb of bandwidth,
> or roughly 500 KB/sec on downloads. That definitely sounds better than
> 200 KB/sec! As subscribers join or leave the LAN, the bandwidth
> available to the people online would decrease or increase: 20,000 Kb /
> n, where "n" is the number of active connections at a given time. But
> you'd never get less than the per-connection bandwidth, even if all 10
> subscribers were online at the same time. 20,000 / 10 = 2,000 Kbits.
>
> Has anybody actually tried this? Also, the same concept would apply to
> any other Internet connection, such as ADSL. Anybody combining two or
> more DSL connections for SuperDSL?


No theory Doug. go here: http://www.xincom.com/products.html

(¯`·._.· £ãrrÿ ·._.·´¯)