Two AirPort Connections to Double Bandwidth

[epocs]

Ok, here's the thing. I have 512kbps Cable, as do my neighbors. I have an AirPort base station and an AirPort card in this G4. They have a linksys wireless router for the PCs they have. I can connect to their network and surf the net from there because they are just close enough to sustain a decent signal. I was wondering if there was any way to connect to both my base station and their linksys at the same time to double my bandwidth to 1Mbps. I do have their consent to do this if I can find a way...any ideas?

[Short Bus Driver]

I think you would need a middle-man of some sort to complete that. Each of those connections has a seperate IP address, so you would have to connect both of them to a router of some sort that would spoof them into a single IP for your computer, and open multiple connections to each server you contact, like dual processors, 2 pipes, 1 task. I've heard that there are copies of linux that take connections from multiple NIC's and "merge" them into a single connection, but I have no freakin' clue how it does that.
-Short Bus Driver

[bakednotfried]

it _would_ be possible, if cable companies knew anything about networking and let their customers do anything real, like bgp!

ahem, cough, cough. sorry about that. and no, i'm not bitter ;)

anyway, do you and your neighbors have the same upstream provider? if so, it is technically possible to achieve this. however, i have yet to hear of a cable company that allowed its customers to do any real networking.

anyway, as an (expensive) academic exercise...

first, you need a router capable of bgp with 4 ethernet interfaces. connect the two cable upstreams and the two house networks to the router.

then, you and the cable company configure bgp to run over the connections where the cable company thinks of you and your neighbor as one autonomous system. (this, of course, is where much cursing and hair pulling occurs) once you have bgp up and running, there are a number of methods available to you to shape the flow of traffic.

note that, atleast for cisco, load balancing works on a per packet or per flow basis. in per packet, if you send two packets, the first should be sent over one interface and the second packet should take the other interface.

in per flow, once you 'open a connection', all packets for that connection (or flow) use the same interface. the next connection that comes along gets sent down the other interface and all packets for that flow continue to use that same interface.

note also, that there are much simpler ways of achieving 'load balancing' in more controlled environments. ie, two t1's can be terminated on cisco 2501's and be told to act like a 3meg connection using loopback addresses in the routers without bgp. i don't know enough about the technology your cable company is using, but i doubt it would be this simple.

hope this helps,
mike