Twice the SPEED - combining connections

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Sidelong

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I only have GRPS (and maybe EDGE this year) where I live but would really like a bit more speed. Perhaps the collective minds in here might have some ideas on this one ... :)

I have the feeling you could use a proxy to seamlessly combine two GPRS connections to get an effective 114kbs download speed. Two issues arise:

1) Cost - YES I will pay for twice the speed (eg 2 data bundles/contracts?) and a second data card.
2) Towers - can they serve two concurrent GPRS requests (I think so ...)

If no to 2) then you could have another account from MTN and join the two accounts to produce one connection.

Mainly interested in feasibility at this stage. Feel that there is a quick definitive answer to this that I am missing, and if that answer is positive I am very keen to give this a try.

Thanks for your thoughts.
 
Okay, your talking about Load-Balancing connections, there are several ways to achieve this and I would be happy to help get you started, But you need to consider a few things, firstly its not as simple as plugging in 2 connections and enjoying the speed, infact you will run into several issues trying to do this. The most effective way to do this would be bonding, I am sure that Dfantom will say the same thing, however it also the most complicated and considering that you will probably be using cell phones to connect your already facing some complications.

However lets keep things simple for now and stick to your idea of using Proxies. You can create a hash routing script which will run on the client machines, basically what it does is tells the browser to jump between 2 proxy servers, it hashes the file names and uses the same proxy each time it needs to pull that file down. IE, when you load a page like MyADSL it would load some of it from one proxy and some of the page from the other proxy, it will also remember which proxy it used and continue to use the same proxy each time it needs to load that file.

The disadvantages to this are rather obvious, firstly the client machine is now suffering the additional workload which might not seem bad on a 3Ghz machine, but at the end of the day you are wasting resources. You are not going to get "double" speed, although you now have 2 connections working for you they are still each working on a single file at a time, this would also be a problem with more complicated solutions but is definately more of a problem with the "proxy method" You will notice this most while downloading a single file with a single thread. With "better" load balancing solutions you could run multiple threads on your downloads and you would get "double" speed.

IMO the biggest down side to doing this is that only Proxied protocols are load balanced. However it a simple solution which should get the job done if browsing the net is your only concern.

For more information and some example have a look at http://naragw.sharp.co.jp/sps/

If you have some free time, a lot of patience and a decent understanding of networking & Linux you could look at full blown Bonding/Load Balancing here http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/nano.txt (you will need the patches from http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/#routes) although I maintain that it might end up being more complicated then its worth, if your going to go that route I suggest getting 2 boxes to run your individual connections off and a third box to do the advanced routing & bonding, simply because static IP's are easier to bond then dynamic IP's. If you can get your phones connecting with something like Smoothwall you could do some basic round robin balancing which wont be amazing however it will get the job done on a single box and should be relatively simple to get working. For more info on Smoothwall Load balancing have a look here http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3365&sid=84e230c2817c96898e1726c00d888111
 
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Alchamy .... so that's a "No" then LOL :D

Seriously - thanks for your time. Unfortunately I have a Windows machine that I would use for the proxy (ok ok ... I know I should upgrade to Linux but I need it for a few other things as well). :)

But essentially what I am hearing is there is no way to actively "join" the two DUCs. Basically you only get the benefit when eg loading two pages @ same time.

Cool. That settles that. I suppose the next is EDGE which basically does the same thing (uses more tower resources) .... so we come back to asking for an EDGE rollout plan.

For the record I have spent the last 4 hours trying to get MTN to give me data bundle pricing for work ... what a nightmare!! Vodacom is definitely more jacked!
 
lol, getting it to work has its challenges. Sidelong, at the end of the day its not a practical solution for home usage.

BTW: you could use windows proxies with hash routing ;) You just need 2 of them.
 
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Sidelong, you should have CS3/4 in your area by end of July. This will give you GPRS speeds around 60-80Kb/s, close to your 2xGPRS idea.

No short term EDGE or UMTS plans.
 
Sidelong said:
I only have GRPS (and maybe EDGE this year) where I live but would really like a bit more speed. Perhaps the collective minds in here might have some ideas on this one ... :)

I have the feeling you could use a proxy to seamlessly combine two GPRS connections to get an effective 114kbs download speed. Two issues arise:

1) Cost - YES I will pay for twice the speed (eg 2 data bundles/contracts?) and a second data card.
2) Towers - can they serve two concurrent GPRS requests (I think so ...)

If no to 2) then you could have another account from MTN and join the two accounts to produce one connection.

Mainly interested in feasibility at this stage. Feel that there is a quick definitive answer to this that I am missing, and if that answer is positive I am very keen to give this a try.

Thanks for your thoughts.
Click to expand...

Hi Sidelong
Whilst it is quite easy to join connections, I dont think it would be a good idea. Firstly, there are only 8 time slots available per channel on GSM, if you pooled two connections and whacked a download, you could effectively bugger up the user experience for everyone. Secondly - on most base stations, only 4 time slots are allocated for Data anyway, so having the 4 extra time slots available via a seperate device would be pointeless, unless you put it over a different network or channel. My recommendation would be for you to petition the various networks to at least upgrade your base station to Coding Scheme 4, this way you will at least get 20Kbps per timeslot, and if you have a class 10 or up handset, that means 80Kbps... The CS4 upgrade is software only on most of the networks infrastructure, so ask MTNBB and Vodacom3G both very nicely until someone obliges :D
Cheers -
 
vodacom3g said:
Sidelong, you should have CS3/4 in your area by end of July. This will give you GPRS speeds around 60-80Kb/s, close to your 2xGPRS idea.

No short term EDGE or UMTS plans.
Click to expand...

Hey Sidelong - there you go :D
 
for windows you can use the freely available wingate software to create a proxy from a wintel box. We use it here in the Uk to join multiple cable modems together (which is also an unsupported configuration)

You do not get double the speed on downloads etc, but what you do get is the ability to download a file via one modem and another via another modem etc (load balancing/sharing)
 
werner said:
...
You do not get double the speed on downloads etc, but what you do get is the ability to download a file via one modem and another via another modem etc (load balancing/sharing)
Click to expand...
Just out of theoretical interest, if you're using a download manager, say ReGet Deluxe, to download using multiple "threads" or segments of the same file, possibly mirrored all around the world on different servers, then surely each of these segments is effectively a different chunk of data, and will benefit from load balancing by allowing one to max out the 2 or more "load balanced" connections...?
 
out of interest, the answer is yes.
:D

some enterprising folks have 2 or more cable modems, each running at up to 3mpbs. Once you max out one modem (on a particular download), wingate will start using the other one, if you have enough threads in your download manager it will spill over to the other modem etc (I use the term modem loosely...lets rather call it "broadband access device").

Unfortunately, you cant have 2 or more adsl modems unless you have multiple phone lines put in, which co$t$ load$....
 
vodacom3g said:
Sidelong, you should have CS3/4 in your area by end of July. This will give you GPRS speeds around 60-80Kb/s, close to your 2xGPRS idea.

No short term EDGE or UMTS plans.
Click to expand...


Woo-hoo!!!

It's very sad that 80kbs makes me so excited :)
 
Out of interest, does Vodacom allow bonding? If not, would there be plans to implement bonding?

For those that don't understand what I mean by Vodacom Supporting bonding, bonding is like using ISDN to connect at 128K, the ISP does the load balancing for you.
 
sidelong, it's amazing how quickly we get used to speed. Not so long ago I paid R7000 per month for a 64K line. Now we consider 80Kb/s to be just scraping along :)

Hopefully we can get EDGE or UMTS (HSDPA!) to you in the not-to-distant future.

alchamy, I'll have to check on the bonding issue, but my gut reaction would be no. There's not really been a requirement for something like this.

Do you see a need? With justification, anything is possible...
 
vodacom3g said:
alchamy, I'll have to check on the bonding issue, but my gut reaction would be no. There's not really been a requirement for something like this.

Do you see a need? With justification, anything is possible...
Click to expand...

In all honestly no, more just out of curiousity. Its far easier and probably more cost effective to get 3G (sticking with GPRS bonding), with 2mbit around the corner it would be overkill. Although I could think of a few things to do with 4mbit ;)
 
vodacom3g said:
'Speed gluttons, we are' to qoute Yoda.

I guess the easiest would be to do your own load balancing, if needed, as described higher up in this thread.
Click to expand...

Speed is good ;)

Setting up your own load balancing is not that difficult if you understand networking. I don't like the proxied method though, thats just a waste of time. You need to build an advanced router to truely balance your incoming and outgoing traffic.
 
Hi alchamy ... been digesting your info for a while :)

Back to my quest: I now have a Vodacom AND an MTN GPRS connection. I don't want to buy a separate router so I want to try the dodgy proxy route for load balancing.

You mentioned I would need TWO proxies ... and then hash them.

OK - here's where I need help: could I install FreeProxy and AnalogX proxy on my XP box and proceed from there?

If so, where do I put the JavaScript hash routing script?? :confused:

:) I'm sure these questions seem pretty dumb to you but any help would be much appreciated!
 
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