Load Balance LAN/WIFI

[haoli]

Is there a way to load balance network traffic if you have two ISP. One ISP is on wireless and the other is on ethernet. I'm talking about my school's network which has both. I want to know if there is a way to even out the throughput so for instance I can download a file from microsoft using my wireless and download music through wired network with both lines going at max capacity.

-Hao

[christopher_wolf]

Welcome to the Thinkpad Forums

Talking about a Shotgun setup? Hmmmm

It is possible, although difficult to do to get Windows to play nice with both net connections at the same time; not sure how it will react to a download coming at it from two different net connections.

You need to have a Dual-WAN router for that; but you will be increasing, primarily, your bandwidth and not really speed all that much. For example, say you are downloading something in IE; IE will *not*, as far as I have seen, combine two download streams from two net connections into one. It will just pick one and go with it, not touching the other.

I have tried setups like this before and found that the bandwidth increase you get is not as much as one would like to think. That and you have to spend a good deal of time making sure everything is setup correctly. Besides, most of it depends on the router hardware which, in this case, lies with the School. I would say it isn't worth the hassle. Firefox does a similar thing, just splits it up into several server download requests.

HTH