Hi all!

I recently got tired of my cable connection and ordered DSL again. I had DSL before I switched to cable - apart from the higher speed EVERYTHING about cable has dissapointed me, so I'm switching again.

So today I've got that DSL connection, but I've still got about 3 months of cable access too.

Now, I have two NIC's in my pc, so I can (and have) connect(ed) both modems.
Is there a way to get them both to connect and so effectively "enhance" my connection speed by almost a third?
I've tried already, but my DSL account won't dial in. (mind you, it IS possible it hasn't been activated yet too)

Should I do something special in my OS (win 2000) to make this work or should it work just like that ?
CAN this even work, considering I would combine the dataflow of two different ISP's ?

There's not really a very good way to make that work. You could manually add a second default route for the second connection, and it might work, but, then again, it might not. It depends largely on the OS. But, at best, you'll be sending requests for half of your things out of one interface and requests for the other half out of the other interface, and receiving the replies for each thing back on the interface you sent them from. Without using relatively advanced networking protocols (which wouldn't actually work for you because standard internet policies would tend to prevent it working for such a small network), there's no way to really combine them.

What you're looking for is load balancing between two NIC's. This would have to be a function of the OS. May be possible if your DSL is straight ethernet (not PPPOE.)

What you're talking about is usually reserved to mean load balancing over multiple NICs on one network, when your NICs don't have large enough bandwidth to handle all of the traffic on just one. This, unfortunately, won't help in this situation because all of his traffic is not on one LAN. He's trying to distribute his traffic across two default routes, and that's much more difficult to do well, since, in order to get it to work well, you'd have to coordinate with the upstream providers and get them to coordinate amongst each other. Which is not going to happen in this case.

You're right. My head was in "Intel PRO/Dual Port" adapter land.

Thanks for the replies guys. So judging from your replies it's it's not really do-able. I don't think I'll look into it anymore then. I just thought it would be neat to try.
The only this left to do now is to get rid of that cable connection ASAP. It's worked on my nerves long enough now.

Thanks!

Well, again, you could get something to work by setting multiple default routes on the machine that's actually connected to both Internet connections. This will probably do something. Most modern IP stacks will switch back and forth between them, but there's no guarantee of that. If you used a download manager that supported multiple concurrent downloads, it might actually do something to increase your usable bandwidth, but that's about the only place you'd find that it would work better.

If I were in your shoes, I'd at least try it.

I had to switch once too when I moved out of town. I knew that the carrier was "shady" but I tried it anyway. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't great (or even good for that matter.) And the fact that I had lived less than 1 mile from my DSL CO (great throughput) wasn't helping much either.

I eventually switched back as well. Unfortunately getting re-connected reinforced why I tried the Cable in the first place.... The phone Company got involved. [sad]

There was a review on /. of a home router that was supposed to do this, but the reviews were mediocre, and you'd have to buy a $~250 router... The problem that arises is that using seperate IP addresses the most you're ever going to be able to load balance them is on a per-connection basis, and the average person or home network doesn't have too many connections going at once. Well, I take that back to some extent, as Kazaa and other filesharing apps will download seperate parts of a file from different people at the same time, so perhaps that would help.

Honestly, how many people spend a lot of time with their DSL/Cable connection maxed out? I hardly ever find large downloads that are nearly as fast as my baseline DSL connection.

Matthew

There are a few times. Downloading large sources to compile on a Unix machine can be quite sizeable. Folks leeching stuff off of their news servers would see this a lot (but, then, the news servers are likely to be tied to their Internet connections). Probably not a lot of time, but it could be significant occasionally.

You're right. I can at least try it. And I will. But somehow I believe my account hasn't been set up yet, because I still can't get a connection through it. I'll phone my DSL company tomorrow and ask them what's up. Should be fixed very soon then, judging from previous calls I made to their support center.
In fact that's one of the main reasons I'm leaving the cable company. With them you've already archieved great success when you actually can get somebody on the phone! They're a fine example of how customer support shouldn't be!

The main reason I switched to cable was for the cable phone option. I got sick and tired of the normal phone company, and decided to go cable.... only to find out that phone by cable would NEVER be an option in my area, because the necessary cable were simply not there and they were never going to fix this. Only internet would be possible. Of course they only told me that AFTER I had signed the contract with the cable company. (after promising me otherwise before!)

So then I had a cable internet connection (which I didn't need in the first place, I had ADSL), and I was STILL STUCK with the normal phone company !
A good thing my house is well isolated. I swore A LOT that day!