Combining two wireless conections

[Ty909]

I was wondering if it is possible to combine two wireless conections. The scenario is that I have a wireless conection and so does my neigbor next door. Before we go on, this has nothing to do with wardriving. I am not stealing his connection!

Okay, so I have a connection through earthink broadband and he has the same setup but through Roadrunner. I am able to connect to his connection, but at the same time dropping mine and he can connect to mine. So at this time it connects to one service only. I want to be able to combine the speed from my earthlink connection and his roadrunner connection. Is this at all possible?

Thanks...

[rgharper]

In theory - yeah. In reality - not with any equipment you're going to buy at Best Buy, Radio Shack or your favorite computer store.

[confus-ed]

I reckon you can buy the stuff you'd need from a shop.. It depends though what we are up to !

There's load balancing to give us greater bandwidth, or there's multiplexing to give us greater speed - the second one is straight out of the window as a choice, as that'd depend on having the ISPs at the other end co-operate & if they'll do that, buy one faster line & split that up/share instead!

If we are doing load balancing it's best if we do that at the router level or at least outside our box, as multiple NICs present or not, windows can only talk to one connection at once (well tcp/ip can only use one gateway at once) so we want something like this ;- netgear prosafe range ($200 or less I'd have thought) ..then you'll have to get all Heath Robinson about how you wire it up, depending on what you've already got..

& btw by way of illustration as I know folks get confus-ed about these two phrases ..

..Dual Wan Routers dont double your 'speed' They increase your bandwidth. If you DL a 2MB file it will not DL any faster with two WANs, but if you DL 2 such files they will each DL at the same time via balancing....

[rgharper]

I reckon you can buy the stuff you'd need from a shop.. It depends though what we are up to !

<snippage>

so we want something like this ;- netgear prosafe range ($200 or less I'd have thought)

Nope, that device doesn't look like it will work. It provides a second connection for "failover" events - when link #1 goes down link #2 takes over. This would be something like for a business that has a primary high-bandwidth link (T3 or OC3) with a slower backup link (T1) that is live but not needed until the first link fails.

There are no retail devices that can do load balancing. You can set up a Windows Server 2000 or Server 2003 box to do it or you can buy a commercial-grade router but nothing that you'll find in a local computer store will.

As I think I said earlier.

[geoscomp]

Nope, that device doesn't look like it will work. It provides a second connection for "failover" events - when link #1 goes down link #2 takes over. This would be something like for a business that has a primary high-bandwidth link (T3 or OC3) with a slower backup link (T1) that is live but not needed until the first link fails.

There are no retail devices that can do load balancing. You can set up a Windows Server 2000 or Server 2003 box to do it or you can buy a commercial-grade router but nothing that you'll find in a local computer store will.

As I think I said earlier.

I dont know, RG..the specs for it say specifically two 10/100Mbps Ethernet RJ-45 ports with auto fail-over and load balancing top of page 2 here

[rgharper]

I dont know, RG..the specs for it say specifically two 10/100Mbps Ethernet RJ-45 ports with auto fail-over and load balancing top of page 2 here

You are indeed correct, the expanded specs do say that.