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Speed up your cable modem with
Conenction Teaming!
(Advanced
level article)
Chris Kaminski
3/16/2001
At NetWorld+Interop 2001 I
found an interesting piece of software called MidPoint from MidCore
Software. Midpoint has a
feature called ‘connection teaming’. Connection teaming aggregates
multiple connections to the Internet for increased bandwidth. Along with
connection teaming, the software splits large files being downloaded into
multiple smaller parts and downloads each part at the same time along each
connection. Wow!
I came up with this idea for cable modem users.
Cable modem companies sometimes allow you to purchase additional IP address’ for a monthly fee.
@Home does this for $5 per IP address. @Home caps
your bandwidth per account, not IP address - but at the very least, it might
increase the efficiency of your conenction and allow your throughput to closer reach
your capped maximum speed.... So I set off to test my hypothesis.
Planning the network
Because I would be testing the aggregation of 2
Internet IP address, I needed a computer that could handle 3 network cards
– three for the WAN and one for the LAN. A stripped down Pentium 233 fit
the bill nicely.
Problems with the
testing
One of the biggest problems in
testing this setup is finding a way to push the speed of the cable modem.
To do this, I had to find some servers willing to let suck up a whole lot
of bandwidth without running into something that would throttle my
connection. This is VERY HARD to find. My best performance came from some
TUCOWS.COM
mirrors. Since TUCOWS is mirrored all over the
country, I was able to locate some servers willing to let me suck up some
bandwidth. Measuring Bandwidth
The next thing I needed was a
measurement tool. IE’s meter on the download is good for measuring speed
because it averages things over a long period of time and does not allow
you to ‘see’ what is going on. MyVitalAgent
was a good solution because I could see how solid
the connection was. If there were major connection pauses I could see them
visually – plus the software is free!  Bandwidth measurement on the Internet is not an
exact science. It is impossible to recreate the exact conditions across a
public network. Because of this, I chose to measure bandwidth at its peak
if sustained for 10 seconds or more. To do this, I chose files of no less
than 5Mb to download. How Fast?
For Reference, I tried pushed
each if two IP address’ individually first. IP address A gave me about
840kbps sustainable bandwidth and IP
address B could give me about 600kbps sustained bandwidth. I was surprised at
the difference since they were from the same cable modem
- They did however have different default gateways and were on
different subnets. These speeds will of course vary betweed service providers.
Notice that my speed is capped at 1.4~1.5 but my throughput is
unstable and reaches only about 850kbps.
  With connection teaming enabled, I was able
to sustain speeds of 1300kbps, or 1.3Mbps when downloading multiple
large files (note, the cap is
still 1.5Mbps). This is not bad for a single cable modem! In addition, web
page surfing seemed to ‘spring’
to life. A single web page might require 7 or more requests for
text and graphics. When these requests are being done over two different IP
address response time improves dramatically. This does not push your 'throughput' but
it does make web pages come up faster due to the increased
network efficiency. IMPORTANT: The Key is the
Subnets
They key to my success seemed to
be in the fact that the two tested IP address’ were on different subnets with
different default gateways. I tried running the same test on two
IP address’ that were on the same subnet / same default gateway and had
almost no improvement. This is a VERY important note. These tests were done with STATIC
IP address.
ATTN: @Home Users
When you sign up for multiple computers, you are
getting multiple IP address' - STATIC ONES! Instead of setting your
computer name, set IP, Subnet, default gateway and DNS servers
manually. You can get all that information from this @Home networking site.
When you set your IP info manually, you do NOT need a specific computer
name! Reference:
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