Baiter Posted April 2, 2004 Report Share Posted April 2, 2004 Well I'm still anxiously awaiting for my dsl modem, but I thought about how nice it would be if I could combine my dsl and cable modem to give me the best of both worlds. Turns out you can. :shock: This router let's you utilitize 2 separate connections to give you rediculously fast speeds. :twisted: Well I already have merlot and ballmeat considering getting a second cable modem, and I thought some of you gaming junkies w/ a few extra bucks might be interested. I'm still not sure if I'm willing to foot the bill, but I could get 5mbs down and 1mbs up for $70/mo. 8) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buck Posted April 2, 2004 Report Share Posted April 2, 2004 It's worth a shot, but you'll most likely be introducing some serious latency issues with 2 different providers. But, then again it depends how well the device handles load balancing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Covak Posted April 3, 2004 Report Share Posted April 3, 2004 I thought some of you gaming junkies w/ a few extra bucks might be interested. Is it even possible to have a game use both connections? I can't see a benefit for online gaming, even if it can... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buck Posted April 3, 2004 Report Share Posted April 3, 2004 Originally posted by Covak@Apr 2 2004, 07:17 PM I thought some of you gaming junkies w/ a few extra bucks might be interested. Is it even possible to have a game use both connections? I can't see a benefit for online gaming, even if it can... It's possible, but like I said the latency from having 2 different providers will hurt more than it will help, IMO of course At my old job our parent company had 2 T1 connections from us and we load balanced the 2, 1 for data, 1 for voice. It worked out extremely well, but these connections were off of one of our DS3's. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baiter Posted April 3, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 3, 2004 Originally posted by Buck@Apr 2 2004, 03:59 PMbut you'll most likely be introducing some serious latency issues with 2 different providers. I'm not following you? If I'm playing a game with you and my ping time on dsl is 20, and 15 on the cable modem, well how could my ping time be increased? It's at worst 20, right? I've been out of the loop for some time, strictly software now, so any info you can provide would be greatly appreciated. I tryed to find some reviews for gaming but couldn't I'd also like to be able to utilize for my vpn, but I suspect this is impossible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Covak Posted April 3, 2004 Report Share Posted April 3, 2004 I can see the device making 2 connections seem like 1 on your end when you're just downloading or uploading stuff, where multiple connections are possible. But for games, how would it work? I mean, to the server your connection would look like two seperate connections, no? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Buck Posted April 3, 2004 Report Share Posted April 3, 2004 Originally posted by Baiter+Apr 2 2004, 08:00 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Baiter @ Apr 2 2004, 08:00 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Buck@Apr 2 2004, 03:59 PMbut you'll most likely be introducing some serious latency issues with 2 different providers. I'm not following you? If I'm playing a game with you and my ping time on dsl is 20, and 15 on the cable modem, well how could my ping time be increased? It's at worst 20, right? [/b] For an example say your Cable provider is Cox and your DSL is from Verizon. Chances are that the origin of the 2 connections are located in different places, on 2 different routers. Now, the response time from one router may take 20ms to respond and the other 10ms. The problem I see comes from when one connection is waiting on the other. In my eyes this will cause an increase in latency as the connection that responds first will see the other as not available. But, when the other responds (10ms later) the calculations for load balancing are done again, increasing the latency while syncing up. All it takes is a small increase in latency and a good load balancer will fail over to the active connection. Remember the primary purpose for a load balancer is redundancy. Like I said, to me it sounds like it will be more trouble than it's worth. But, if you wind up trying it I'd be interested to know how it performs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrJames Posted April 3, 2004 Report Share Posted April 3, 2004 I looked into doing this last year with two Comcast connections at 1800/300 for $43 each. Comcast Pro was offered at $95 for 3500/384 so it would have been cheaper to get a dual wan set up with a combined 3600/600. I did a lot of research but before investing a nice chunk of money decided that it wouldn't work the way I wanted it to. First off it is NOT going to give you a 3600/600 pipe to download a single file. One single transfer is only going to be as fast as ONE of your connections unless you are using a multipoint download utility like DAP. Your speed is only going to be as fast as the speed cap on your WAN one port. Once that connection is saturated the dual wan router will load balance by using the WAN two port when a second connection is requested by either a separate file transfer or another PC hooked to the same router. If you use DAP then this may be of interest to you. I thought this might work for hosting as 600 up would have been nice for Xbox Live hosting but again dual wan routers don't work that way which is why abandoned the idea. Comcast has since downgraded my upload from 300 to 256 when they bumped the download speeds from 1800 to 3300 nationwide. Xincom has been hard at work with a new Aggregation Firmware for thier routers which they claim will utilize both connections simultaneously without the need for software like DAP. They are also working on a dual wan router for servers but whether or not that would work with Xbox Live is the big question. Once the hardware is released and gets some of the bugs worked out I'll take another look at doing something like this but for now just isn't really worth the investment for me. Besides the broadband war is heating up between cable and DSL. Throw in BPL, wireless and fiber deployments and there may not be need for going the dual wan route. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baiter Posted April 3, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 3, 2004 Thanks for the info MrJames, I'm still optimistic about this product. I'm hoping to find a vendor with a good return policy so I can give it a shot without having to layout $150 for what could turn into a doorstop. For my uses, I think this could be ideal. When using xbox live, I'd suspect you're communicating with various xbox's independently (sp). a good example would be SC:PT, there would be no need to send your voice to the server for rebroadcast, sending it straight to your teammate would make a lot more sense. I'm sure it's usefulness would vary depending on the game. The other huge plus for me is the redundancy, I work from home 3 days a week, and my VPN connection going down would force me to have to enter the office. :shock: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beer Monkey Posted April 4, 2004 Report Share Posted April 4, 2004 I can't see this substantially increasing bandwidth for a game client in a client-server environment that uses TCP. But it could help hosting, and peer-based gaming. It would of course be marvelous for things like Bittorrent. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Calvin Posted April 4, 2004 Report Share Posted April 4, 2004 Well,if someone comes up with a cost-efficent way of doing this - please post it here. My friend would love to do something like this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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