Combining Internet?

yagga

Is there a way me and my neighbor can work together to connect both our cable internet connections to increase our total speed? I've never hooked up a wireless network before and am wondering if this is possible. We'd both be interested in speeding things up a little, especially the upload which is slow. What would I need if this were possible? I have no wireless equipment as of this writing.

TheBaron

this is essentially the same discussion that was had
here

yagga

Thrax wrote:

You need a load-balancing router. Zytel makes a couple of good ones.[/url]

So we both would need one of these? Can they pick up one line from our own cable wire/ethernet and the second line through the air and combine them?

TheBaron

I doubt it, you'd somehow need to convert the air signal back into a ground signal... this could get complicated fast

yagga

ok, I wouldn't want to do this, but could I convert it from a pc and then connect it back to the router in the wan slot and then that would spread out the connection? Basically the one computer would be a gateway or whatever in itself.

Jonsey

Wow, where to start?

The short answer is you can't for anything close to economical (looking like ~$1000 per connection).

Also, without a rather complex understanding of routers and internetworking (not little d-link or netgear boxes (though they do have their place)), this is going to go way over your head, I'd think.

The long & short is that you need to have a "smart" enough router connected to the two connections to load balance over them. Now, while this will let you do some things better (multiple silmultaneous downloads), this will not (for most things) boost your overall maximum speed. For a soloution like that, you better have an agreement with the service provider.

I believe the simplest, though this is at work, and I haven't given more thought to this than the time it's taken me to type this out, topology to do this would be to have your friend's connection piped to a router with two WAN interfaces, then to re-distribute that connection back to your friend.

That would mean a wireless link from his cablemodem to yours, a nice spendy router (think ~$600, go to CDW and see what they want for a good router, say something nicer than a Cisco 1700) and another, seperate wireless link back to his location. I'd peg it at nearly $2000 for somethign that could be better had for an upgrade of your service from the ISP.

khan

Summary of the above: you could do it but it would cost you a lot more and if you have money to burn you should just get a better broadband connection.