Quote:
Originally Posted by deed02392
Sorry, I understood that much, but I thought he meant to simply forget the internet and just have a big LAN, which I now understand is a WAN, which is not the same as the internet. Sorry about that.
Y'know, I've dreamed many times of such a condition, yet the sad fact is no one near me would ever do something of the sort, as they are not technically minded enough to understand what this would incur.
One day ;'(
---------- Post added at 23:35 ---------- Previous post was at 23:02 ----------
To follow up, does anyone know exactly how one would simeltaneously take advantage of multiple internet connections. I.e. how would I download from more than one internet connection? I cannot seem to find a download manager which could do this, for exmaple if i had two wireless connections within my PC, how would I download with both my home internet and my neighbours internet connection?
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Bonding connections together (or load-balancing) is a technically complex and potentially expensive process.
You can do it the low-budget way, by running a Smoothwall router which takes inputs from all the various connections to effectively act as a proxy server, but it's still a bit of a 'faux' connection bonding technique - what the router will most likely do is assign one particular path for each connection made from your machine (and keep it assigned for the return path) - so if you were using P2P, all your traffic would go over one connection, if you were gaming, it would choose another connection etc... Otherwise it can cause real problems. Example: if you're seeding on a private tracker, and the tracker is seeing information updates for your user ID hash coming from two distinct IP addresses... You'd most likely get banned for trying to cheat the tracker, even though you're seeding legitimately.
Likewise, many games rely on UDP streams, which need one contiguous connection to run over - you can't split the packets over several connections and just expect it to work, because it horribly breaks networking specs.
It is doable, but just not in the true sense of 'bonding' - the only *real* bonding solutions are done over DSL, aren't even officially supported by BT because they're too problematic, and are prohibitively expensive to implement and run. Example: Andrews & Arnold offer a bonding service, it costs a shitload, you need (EXPENSIVE) Cisco kit installed on both your end and the exchange end, and it turns each DSL line into, effectively, a channel - the dedicated hardware at either end multiplex the data. The lines have to be running perfectly, at the same speeds, and if one line has a problem, everything falls over.
Oh, and thinking more low-scale, you can't have more than one residential cable connection installed at any one premises due to limitations with the billing system (apparently)... So if you wanted to install a line for you and a line for the kids, you'd have to get an ntl:telewest business cable installation for your second line (£40 a month but no STM and a 20Mb uplift coming in the next few months).