Looking for simple newbie advice...

Hey folks,

I am looking for ideas on the best way to route two PCs wirelessly.

The situation:

1) My PC is (the only PC) hooked up to an ADSL router at 512kbps.

2) My neighbour's PC is hooked up directly to a cable modem at
512kbps. He lives directly above me.

Questions:

A) Is it possible for us to both share our broadband connections
(effective doubling our bandwidth for multiple streams)? Are there any
tools that can manage this for us easily and efficiently? The idea is
that when I'm on a downloading spree when his PC is idle I get double
the bandwidth, and vice versa.

B) We would like to do this wirelessly. What is the best way (and the
best current standard) to hook up our PCs? Buy two wireless network
cards? We would also like standard networkking capabilities, so we can
fileshare/play games etc.

Thanks for any help.

Rudi

PS - I am technical so please gimme any jargon you need to; it's just
my first ever foray into the world of wireless LANs and it's pretty
confusing!

Rudi Cheow wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> I am looking for ideas on the best way to route two PCs wirelessly.
>
> The situation:
>
> 1) My PC is (the only PC) hooked up to an ADSL router at 512kbps.
>
> 2) My neighbour's PC is hooked up directly to a cable modem at
> 512kbps. He lives directly above me.
>
> Questions:
>
> A) Is it possible for us to both share our broadband connections
> (effective doubling our bandwidth for multiple streams)? Are there any
> tools that can manage this for us easily and efficiently? The idea is
> that when I'm on a downloading spree when his PC is idle I get double
> the bandwidth, and vice versa.
>
> B) We would like to do this wirelessly. What is the best way (and the
> best current standard) to hook up our PCs? Buy two wireless network
> cards? We would also like standard networkking capabilities, so we can
> fileshare/play games etc.
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Rudi
>
> PS - I am technical so please gimme any jargon you need to; it's just
> my first ever foray into the world of wireless LANs and it's pretty
> confusing!

Regarding using both bandwidth feeds, I can't give you a solution, but
it's normally referred to as "bonded" feeds. Getting bonded T1's from
the same phone company presents problems, so my best guess is that you
can't do what you want to do, way too many problems with different
sources of bandwidth over vastly different paths. Maybe you could set
them up as some sort of "failover" in case one poops out the other kicks in?

Then again, maybe I'm wrong. I hope someone has a solution.

"Rudi Cheow" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) om...
> Hey folks,
>
> I am looking for ideas on the best way to route two PCs wirelessly.
>
> The situation:
>
> 1) My PC is (the only PC) hooked up to an ADSL router at 512kbps.
>
> 2) My neighbour's PC is hooked up directly to a cable modem at
> 512kbps. He lives directly above me.
>
> Questions:
>
> A) Is it possible for us to both share our broadband connections
> (effective doubling our bandwidth for multiple streams)? Are there any
> tools that can manage this for us easily and efficiently? The idea is
> that when I'm on a downloading spree when his PC is idle I get double
> the bandwidth, and vice versa.

PPP-MP (MLPPP, RFC 1990) is one standard for doing it, and BonD (Bandwidth
on Demand) is another (now an ISO standard, don't recall the number). ITU
H.223 also specifies a way to do it. They all work similarly.

What you want to do is called inverse multiplexing. It's generally done by a
device called an imux, and there has to be a corresponding imux on the other
side. In this case, "other side" means some point in the internet upstream
from your DSL provider and your neighbor's cable provider. In theory that
could be software on whatever server you're trying to ftp from. In reality,
it's just not practical.

I've never heard of anyone doing this across a packet-switched network,
especially across TCP/IP. I'm sure it could be implemented, but I seriously
doubt that it could ever work well. Data received via imux is not in
original order due to differing end-to-end delays in the channels being
aggregated (the 512k DSL and cable pipes, in your case). An imux usually
aggregates across circuit-switched connections (like multiple PRI channels)
because end-to-end delay changes only very slowly, so it can be measured and
used to efficiently reorder received data. If the relative delays change all
the time, you thrash try to recompute the ordering. TCP/IP is kind of a
worst-case horror scenario for delay variability, made even worse by two
different ISPs.

>
> B) We would like to do this wirelessly. What is the best way (and the
> best current standard) to hook up our PCs? Buy two wireless network
> cards? We would also like standard networking capabilities, so we can
> fileshare/play games etc.
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
> Rudi
>
> PS - I am technical so please gimme any jargon you need to; it's just
> my first ever foray into the world of wireless LANs and it's pretty
> confusing!

In article <(E-Mail Removed) >,
(E-Mail Removed) says...
> A) Is it possible for us to both share our broadband connections
> (effective doubling our bandwidth for multiple streams)? Are there any
> tools that can manage this for us easily and efficiently? The idea is
> that when I'm on a downloading spree when his PC is idle I get double
> the bandwidth, and vice versa.

The short answer is yes. As a practical matter, the answer is no. Trust
me, you probably don't want to go there, especially since "...easily and
efficiently..." is part of your criteria.

--
********************************************
Flatline Wi-Fi -- Un-Wiring You To The World
http://www.flatline.com
********************************************

On 11 Nov 2003 17:47:45 -0800, in alt.internet.wireless ,
(E-Mail Removed) (Rudi Cheow) wrote:

>A) Is it possible for us to both share our broadband connections
>(effective doubling our bandwidth for multiple streams)?

Technically yes. Practically no.
To achieve what you want you'd need to share the same service
provider, the provider would need to agree to bond your two
connections, and you'd need extra hardware in both your premises and
at the provider.

>>We would like to do this wirelessly.

Without the fancy (expensive) hardware, your two connections are
totally separate and though you could (theoretically) route some
traffic to the ADSL and some to the cable, a single download session
could only use one channel at a time. Also, most providers
specifically prohibit the sharing or reselling of connectivity outside
your "home".

It goes without saying that this will all cost.

>What is the best way (and the
>best current standard) to hook up our PCs? Buy two wireless network
>cards? We would also like standard networkking capabilities, so we can
>fileshare/play games etc.

This stuff is no problem. Wireless cards in the two machines, set up a
wireless lan and off you go.


Mark McIntyre