Using multiple home broadband connections?

January 3, 2007 10:36 AM

How can I best use multiple home broadband connections? [more inside]

After a hiccup last week (and a fix today) from my DSL provider, I now have two broadband connections to my home -- 1.5 Mbps of DSL, and another 1.5 Mbps of WiMax (via Clearwire).

Given that we have a bunch of kids and computers, with plenty of bits flowing both ways, it would be pretty cool to aggregate the bandwidth in a simple way. Bonus points for something that would keep things up and running if one of the connections drops momentarily.

How can I do this?

posted by jeffbarr to technology (6 comments total)

You can buy a bandwidth aggregator, but they're not cheap.

You could set up multihoming on your router to address redundancy. How this is done will depend on your router.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:00 AM on January 3, 2007

I would simply put the kids on one network / router and use the other for safer / serious applications.
posted by homodigitalis at 11:05 AM on January 3, 2007

Although it seems like dividing your traffic between two connections like that would be trivial, it's not. If you want to make a project out of it, you can probably do it by taking an old PC and putting 3 NICs in, and setting up appropriate software, but I'm not sure it's going to be worthwhile.

But if you want to give it a shot, here are instructions (using BSD, which is probably the tool for the job):
http://www.michaelbrumm.com/how-to-aggregate-bandwidth.html

There's a lot of merit to the suggestion of putting your kids (and their assumed downloading/music-streaming/etc.) on one line, and keeping the other for more congestion-intolerant needs. If you live in an area where you're not competing with a lot of other 802.11 networks, you might just put a Wifi router on each one, and put them on different channels (as far apart as possible), with different SSIDs and passwords. That way it's trivial to switch a computer from one network to the other.

Bandwidth aggregation is definitely the more technically elegant solution, but it could eat the better part of a weekend (or more) to get working right.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:13 AM on January 3, 2007

D-Link Load Balancing Router (DI-LB604):

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=452&sec=0

Problem solved.
posted by gus at 11:39 AM on January 3, 2007

The Linksys RV042 router is a nice 4 port 10/100 router designed for small offices. It comes with VPN support and two WAN ports. It'll balance your traffic between both ports and handles one going down seamlessly. Looks like right now it starts at $150.
posted by lockle at 11:41 AM on January 3, 2007

Although the previous discussion focused on business usage, there may be some info there you can use. Good luck!

For the record, I agree with Kadin2048's suggestion of putting up two Wifi networks with non-overlapping channels. You can even set the clients (laptops, etc) to fail over automatically from one SSID to the other.
posted by crazyray at 1:31 PM on January 3, 2007