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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:

Combining wifi flow chart

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7 Answers 7

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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.

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    Thanks - when you say 'you cannot achieve 20Mbps of speed' so if i load balanced as you described using something like this HERE Would that mean we can have two people connecting both using the full 10mbps download each, but neither one could use the full 20mbps.
    – sam
    Oct 16, 2013 at 18:55
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    @sam Exactly that. This is because each of the connections will have different public IPs (without bonding on the ISP's side) and no server will maintain a working TCP/UDP connection since the source address is part of the way a TCP/UDP connection is identified and the server would see two different source addresses. Oct 16, 2013 at 18:58
  • Thanks - Im going to have a try at this, ill report how i get on, i found quite a good video about it HERE
    – sam
    Oct 16, 2013 at 22:59
  • The point that is implied but not spelled out is that bonding needs work at two points - one point at your home where outgoing connections are split and incoming ones merged, and one point on the internet that splits the incoming data and merges the outgoing data. Because a single transfer (like one large download) is inherently using just one connection - the server needs a single address to send it to.
    – Nobody
    Feb 2, 2019 at 19:19
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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.

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    Speedify is another service that provides software that bonds all your connections together one of their remote load balancing "Speed Servers". They currently have clients for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.
    – Duvrai
    Mar 23, 2016 at 9:22
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    Speedify performance is really bad when one of the connections is not stable (saturated 3g/4g). It drops the total bandwidth down to almost 0. We got a refund because of that. Oct 13, 2019 at 9:39
  • Your LINK above to some great discussions is broken. Takes you to another page on c|Net.
    – kevdez
    May 19, 2021 at 4:47
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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.

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

omr-architecture

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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.

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

4 x 4Mbps= 16Mbps output

and its very cheap also

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  • nice, does the job perfectly and is still available for 60usd Apr 29, 2019 at 7:52
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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.

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