My PC is situated next to the master socket, to which two phone lines
are connected. Using Win XP, all patches applied.

Is it possible for my PC to be connected to both lines at the same
time, using different ADSL services simultaneously?

I'm guessing the answer will be 'no'.

TIA.



--
Cheers,

Guy

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

Dr Teeth wrote:
yes it can connect to both simultaneously, but without some special hardware
at both ends of the connection, you wont see any kind of speed benefit.

Gaz

On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:28:05 +0100, Dr Teeth
<no.email.here.please@tardis.com> wrote:

I believe that you can get a dual WAN router that would be able to
bond the 2 connections. You would then connect your PC to that.

It wouldn't work with USB modems or anything like that.

So the answer is kinda yes.

I believe there is a 'load balancing' software available that will spread
your requests to utilize both connections.
Of course there are hardware boxes to do that too, but likely to be
expensive.
Regards,
Martin

I was just thinking how wonderful life was, when Dr Teeth
<no.email.here.please@tardis.com> opened his gob and said:

Thanks to all the replies, much appreciated.

--
Cheers,

Guy

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

Dave wrote:

But surely the only improvement you'll get (on ADSL) would be a better
contention ratio, although offset by decreased actual throughput?

"Dr Teeth" <no.email.here.please@tardis.com> wrote in message
news:fs73i2tdrgdq7ef2do1avgp7nqopo3ntq5@4ax.com...
Yes. You will need two ADSL routers / modems and means of connecting to
both. A lot of recent PC's have two ethernet ports as standard. Even if
they don't most ADSL modems have USB ports.

So you could have an BT connection and an AOL connection

Without exrta software at your end choice of connection will be arbitrary.

Using two connections to double your bandwidth (as in ISDN bonding) will be
messy and require things on the net side.

On 3 Oct 2006, "Martin²" <never@give.one> wrote:

Depends whether load balancing was actually needed (not clear from original
question as to what traffic would be on each ISP, or whether simple rules
could be used to divert certain traffic onto one or other).

Some aren't so expensive. One which has been mentioned is from Edimax but
yet to see who supplies them in the UK - to be able to get a firm price -
around 85 pounds was mentioned, I think.

Anyway, as someone else showed it is possible to use "route add" commands
to make traffic to certain IP ranges use a particular router - you could
trigger DNS lookups to go on some low quota connection (in effect tests
that connection is "up") or use one connection for specific types of
traffic such as usenet, or a range of IPs for a specific service, so
perhaps always use ISP #1 (with a fixed IP) for sending e-mail, and
ISP #2 (with dynamic IP) for general purpose use, browsing, etc.

Ade wrote:

Might make more sense to do this utilising two different networks -
lines on different exchanges, or a cable line + ADSL line, etc.

On 03 Oct 2006, John Naismith <john$E20060808@naismith.org.uk> wrote:

possibly worth adding the "-p" isn't allowed with earlier versions
of Windows (I've not tested it on my Win 2000 box, so it may be OK)
and the MASK is only needed where anything less than the full IP is
to be used. For a specific server, no MASK is needed (so fine in a
case where you want access for management or similar and know IP is
not going to change).

Ade wrote:
Eeerm... I'm failing to see how you reached this conclusion. There are
two options here:

1) 'Bonded' ADSL
This requires a special router and the co-operation of your ISP. This
will result in the throughput being doubled (i.e. two 2Mb/s lines bonded
will result in 4Mb/s throughput). A cheapskate's version is also
available using certain dual-WAN routers which wouldn't require any
special configuration on your ISPs part but which would result in
slightly-less-than-double throughput. Still faster than a single line,
though.

2) Two disparate connections
This requires no special equipment - just twice as much normal
equipment. A single PC will only use one of the lines at any given
time, so there will be no increase in throughput. Two PCs accessing a
connection each will, of course, result in 'double throughput'.

Neither of these options has any effect on contention, and nor would any
decrease the data throughput.

Perhaps it would help if you explained what you perceive 'contention
ratio' to mean?

--
Gareth Halfacree
http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk

John Naismith wrote:
Indeed - to clarify, I was meaning 'at any given time' to mean 'for any
given session'; i.e. that a download from a website will go through a
single connection (and thus show no speed improvement,) unlike a bonded
system.

Apologies if I was a trifle vague - although I do this for a living,
thankfully I rarely have to explain it to anyone.

--
Gareth Halfacree http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk
"If Ace Books ever came out with an edition of The Bible, both books
would be edited down to 40,000 words, and they'd be renamed "Master of
Chaos" and "The Thing With Three Souls." - Terry Carr

I was just thinking how wonderful life was, when "R. Mark Clayton"
<nospamclayton@btinternet.com> opened his gob and said:

I can see that using both at the same time would be more trouble than
it would be worth.

I could use the low-tech method of having only one router switched on
at a time I suppose.

Should capping become universal (luckily I'm on a
dictionary-definition unlimited 2MB account) having two separate
accounts with medium limits could be cheaper than having one with high
limits.

I can also experiment with ISPs without having a lengthy cease and
reprovide.

--
Cheers,

Guy

** Stress - the condition brought about by having to
** resist the temptation to beat the living daylights
** out of someone who richly deserves it.

On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:28:27 GMT, in uk.telecom.broadband , Dave
<weirdoboy@gmail.com> wrote:

Your ISP also needs to support bonding, and you'd need to have both
connections with the same ISP.
--
Mark McIntyre

On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:58:15 +0100, in uk.telecom.broadband , John
Naismith <john$E20060808@naismith.org.uk> wrote:

Sort of. Its possible to route some traffic to one adapter and some to
the other. However you can't (say) route a file download over both
lines at once and get the file twice as fast, or send email to your
ISP's smarthost down both lines, or whatever.

So /practically/ you can't get 2x the speed on any individual
function.

--
Mark McIntyre