Two broadband connections at once?

SideshowBob

Hi all,

This is a little bit academic but anyway...

Has anyone here ever had two broadband connections at once?
Perhaps one connection would be used for heavy downloading, the other for general browsing.

In particular, I'm wondering if it's technically possible to have two broadband connections on one phone line? If it is possible, is it worthwhile?

Thanks!

white_falcon

SideshowBob wrote: »

Hi all,

This is a little bit academic but anyway...

Has anyone here ever had two broadband connections at once?
Perhaps one connection would be used for heavy downloading, the other for general browsing.

In particular, I'm wondering if it's technically possible to have two broadband connections on one phone line? If it is possible, is it worthwhile?

Thanks!

not possible to have two broadband connections on the same phone line as they both use the same part of your phone line. Only on bb connection per phone line.

I know people who have had bb connection - BT, Eircom and NTL all at the one time. That was cuz there was 9 of em in the house, and they all played games online and downloaded, so once they had exceeded their cap on one line they used the next one lol

Lady Lainy

well im not expert, but could u not just go for a highspeed broadband like 4MB or 6MB, im sure that would give you more than enough power for heavy downloading aswell as general surfing. just a matter of finding the right highspeed broadband, and comparing the download caps on each provider, and also, what penilties and extra charges they inforce if you were to go over the download limit.

white_falcon

Lady Lainy wrote: »

well im not expert, but could u not just go for a highspeed broadband like 4MB or 6MB, im sure that would give you more than enough power for heavy downloading aswell as general surfing. just a matter of finding the right highspeed broadband, and comparing the download caps on each provider, and also, what penilties and extra charges they inforce if you were to go over the download limit.

exactly. depending on where u are Ipstream(phone line) or Cable bb are your options. phone line bb speed depends on your distance from the exchange, line conditions, line quality etc. and cable bb speeds depend on contention rates (how many people in your area use cable bb)

XJR

Lady Lainy wrote: »

....just a matter of finding the right highspeed broadband, and comparing the download caps on each provider, and also, what penilties and extra charges they inforce if you were to go over the download limit.

Alternatively you could try smart who don't have a download cap !

Username!

And Smart with a router that has Bandwidth management built in is perfect, very nice idea.

Just give say your downloading (via Ethernet) about 4MB and the browsing (wireless) the 2MB.

white_falcon

XJR wrote: »

Alternatively you could try smart who don't have a download cap !

would definitively not recommend them...

Spear

white_falcon wrote: »

would definitively not recommend them...

You're in a very small minority there
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055220148

pizzahead77

white_falcon wrote: »

would definitively not recommend them...

Why not?

SideshowBob

Thanks to all for the speedy responses, it was something that I was curious about more than actually intending to do.

I have another technical question about why only one broadband connection per line:
Surely any packets sent by me through Connection A would be addressed to the equipment of Company A on the far side of my connection before being sent to the rest of the Internet? And wouldn't any packets sent through Connection B (which uses the same line as Connection A) be addressed to Company B?
In that case, although occupying the same portion of the line (in frequency terms), wouldn't both sets of packets ultimately get to the correct place (and from there to the Internet)? I'm thinking here of a situation where each connection has the ability to use up to half of the capacity of my line.

This really is academic I suppose but I like to have a very clear idea of whats going on! Again, thanks for any help that you can give.

stevenmu

It's to do with the physical layer, i.e. the actual electricity travelling down the cable. Packets are a higher level concept. In short your modem recieves a packet to transmit, it then encodes the 1s and 0s in that packet onto waveforms which are transmitted electrically over the phone line, your ISPs equiptment at the other end interprets the waveforms as 1s and 0s, builds them into a packet and routes them on.

The waveforms used to encode data occupy a band of fequencies defined by the DSL standards, if you tried to have more than one physical link over the same wire, the waveforms would interfere in a way which could not be decoded at the other end, destroying the data on both. It would be possible to define a new standard allocating different chunks of frequencies to each broadband connection, but this woudl require all new equiptment at both ends. Also each connection would get far less than half the total bandwidth due to the way DSL uses interference of waveforms of multiple frequencies to encode 1s and 0s.

SideshowBob

Excellent reply stevenmu, you've answered all my questions there, and then some. Thanks very much

watty

It is possible however to have Multiple Metro or Cable or Wireless modems. Or multiple phone lines.

Then there are several different ways of using those. Using more than one connection on a single Network card though usually needs a concentrator of some kind. Aggregation of connections to make a logically fatter/faster single one needs a special box at your end and ISP end. That is not cheap.

Usually the solution is a single faster connection, 10Mbps is possible on LLU adsl2+ and vdsl, Cable and Metro. You'll pay extra for higher or no cap and lower contention, both important if you really need the higher speed.

white_falcon

pizzahead77 wrote: »

Why not?

whoops. sorry i misread. i mean Irish BB are crap. Never had smart bb. They sound good anyway

zAbbo

I ran something like this years back, using a smoothwall distro and an old machine.

1 x DSL WAN Connection
1 x Wireless Metro WAN Connection

cregser

zAbbo wrote: »

I ran something like this years back, using a smoothwall distro and an old machine.

1 x DSL WAN Connection
1 x Wireless Metro WAN Connection

Yeah, I was trying to think of an appliance that would do load sharing. A linux distro and an old machine (which should be easily sourced from work, friend, collegue etc.) would be the way to go. You'd need 3 network interfaces on the PC though.

IMO - if your goin to invest in a second ISP, why not get one you can bring around with you - like vodafone or O2? It may be harder to load share that connection with a DSL one though...

watty

It would only be any use when the DSL failed.