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kingdango
Asked: 2012-11-15 06:04:46 +0800 CST

How can I team or balance two DSL connections? [duplicate]

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Possible Duplicate:
Is there a sensible way of ‘teaming’ two ADSL connections?

WARNING: I am NOT a networking professional (obviously, see below) but I am a programmer and have a decent understanding of how the bits get moved.

Is it possible to increase my actual/perceived bandwidth by combining two incoming DSL connections (from the same provider) and either balancing them on a dual connection modem(?) or a router that will accomplish the same?

Bonus: What hardware (consumer hopefully) is required?

Is this possible?

router

2 Answers

  1. I'm a strong advocate of link-balancer devices in these scenario. I prefer the products by Elfiq, but Barracuda, Peplink, Fortigate and other offerings exist.

    In the Elfiq case, bandwidth from multiple ISP's can be aggregated and distributed using several load balancing algorithms. E.g. round-robin, least traffic, weighted, etc.

    The inbound traffic can also be balanced using some DNS trickery.

    In both cases, loss of a connection means graceful failover to the other lines. It's transparent to users.

    As far as perceived bandwidth, each line is used on a per-session basis. So, if the links are saturated, this helps distribute the load... But the better approach would be to get a higher-bandwidth link if single user/session bandwidth is the problem.

    Also see: Multi-WAN bonding across different media

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  2. Yes this is possible. A lot of companies do it for 2 reasons;

    Increased bandwidth. Also failover. I would get 2 different DSL connections from 2 different ISP’s. That way if an ISP has an issue there is less likely hood of downtime*.

    • caveat; DSL uses copper wires and if you have 2 connections into a building these generally connect near each other in the exchange. Usually on the same DSLAM. So if there is a problem at the exchange your just as bad off. But you could always mix fibre and copper 
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