Merging two incoming broadband lines for faster Internet

Question

We have a broadband line coming into our building which delivers around 8-10Mbps, which is okay but not great. Fiber is available in our area (30-100Mbps) but it's not available where we are just yet.

Is there some way we could connect two lines (which we would take from two different providers so we would have redundancy if one failed) and merge them into one signal which we could distribute?

Is there some sort of setup that can do this?

Of course we have the option of a leased line but for 12Mbps symmetrical upload/download we'd be looking at around £500 per month compared to £15 per month for normal or fiber broadband.

I made a small pseudo flow chat of the setup below:

Answer 1

This is known as Multi-Homing or Multi-WAN. Most router manufacturer firmwares don't support this, but 3rd party firmware (DD-WRT, pfsense) is capable of doing load-balancing on a Multi-WAN connection.

The catch is while you can create 20Mbps of bandwidth, you cannot achieve 20Mbps of speed on a single connection. You would be able to have two independent 10Mbps streams, however.

To actually merge two connections into a single connection where you can push the combined bandwidth as if it's coming from a single pipe requires bonding, which would either need to be provided by your ISP if all the connections are with the same ISP, or by a 3rd party if the connections are to different ISPs or your ISP won't do bonding for you. It looks like shanabus' answer has some links that can help you explore that idea.

Answer 2

You could try a service that runs "Broadband Bonding" such as Mushroom Networks.

This may be effectively possible through software (such as Octopus+) running on a PC connected to multiple internet connections, but that would happen after your router so your diagram wouldn't fit. You would have two separate routers connecting to your ISPs then run those connections into your PC.

Some great discussion on this thread talks about different setups that might get you going in the right direction.

Answer 3

Wingate supports multiple outgoing connections. You can set up multiple outgoing connections as either fallback, or bundle them to one big pipe:

Provide secure and managed Internet access for your entire network via a single or multiple shared internet connections

This is a software-only solution (apart from the extra Ethernet card you would need), price depends on your network size.

Answer 4

I have never used them but this company makes something to do what your looking for

http://www.mushroomnetworks.com/product/truffle-lite

Acceleration - With Truffle Lite Internet load balancer, all HTTP downlink sessions are aggregated for faster transfer via the Broadband Bonding technology. Even in cases of single HTTP session (an example of such a session is a single file download), all Internet access lines are simultaneously and intelligently combined together to provide a faster data transfer for that single session.

Answer 5

OpenMPTCProuter uses MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) to aggregate multiple Internet connections and OpenWrt.

Answer 6

I am using Mikrotik Device for Bonding Check Link http://routerboard.com/RB750GL

4 x 4Mbps= 16Mbps output

and its very cheap also

Answer 7

There is a service called Speedify that allows to bond multiple (wifi and non-wifi) connections

It supports PC, Mac, IPhone and Android.

You can find more about it here.

Answer 8

You can not merge the bandwidth of two connections into a single connection. But you can divide the received data between connections. That way you get will get download speeds. It will work on download accelerators, torrents and protocols that used multiple connections.

I have written a guide on how to merge broadband connections based on Load balancing.

http://www.techkhoji.com/how-to-guides/how-to-combine-multiple-internet-connections/