What if I told you that you can double, triple, or even quadruple your internet speed with one easy trick?
Well, you'd probably say,
Yeah, I've heard that before!
This asshole told me to duct tape my belt to my network cable,
then laughed at me when my pants fell down.
But wait!
This time it's actually real!
Our internet service provider here at Linus Media Group,
ITEL Networks, sent us this fancy box
that allows you to bond together multiple internet connections
in what is effectively internet SLI.
And I've been using it for the last three months.
So let's talk about some pretty cool network magic and how it works.
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Let's get this out of the way.
Bonded internet is faster,
but it is not free.
If you've tried the free ways to get faster internet,
you'll know that they don't work anyway, though,
so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
So what's the point of making this video?
And what is the point of bonding at all then, Linus?
If I wanted a faster internet connection,
I could just buy a faster internet connection like you did.
No voodoo required.
Well,
there are a number of reasons,
but I'll start with mine,
since it actually covers a few of the most common ones.
Now, the office here is fine,
but at my house,
at the time of setting this up,
the fastest download speed I could get was 100 megabit,
and the fastest upload speed available on a residential ADSL or cable line was 10 megabit,
which is great for uploading the odd cat video to Facebook,
but I have experienced some data loss scares recently,
and I wanted to set up an off-site backup for my storage box,
meaning that I could easily be transferring multiple gigs of data in a single day.
And there's also the issue of dynamic IP addresses.
Even fairly basic uses,
like hosting an FTP file server,
require a static IP address to avoid unexpected downtime,
not included with most residential connections.
And then further complicating matters,
many ISPs,
also block some of the common ports associated with hosting websites,
mail servers,
or what have you.
Now you might think then that the obvious solution would be to get a business connection.
But while that would give me a static IP and all of my ports open for running servers or whatever,
those cost significantly more than the residential ones,
and to my shock and awe,
are no faster,
or in Telus' case,
not even available in my area at the same speeds.
So given then that a fiber build out to my house would cost about as much as a new car,
ITEL suggested ordering multiple cheaper residential connections to my house and combining them.
But the only way that I was aware of that that could work is with a load balancing router.
It's a relatively affordable piece of hardware,
but one that's considered more appropriate for failover,
in the event that one connection goes down,
or for distributing net traffic across multiple users.
Like, for example,
if two users are trying to watch two 4 megabit streams,
that could work with two 5 megabit connections.
But if one user was trying to stack those two 5 megabit connections,
and watch a single 8 megabit video stream,
load balancing would not be the solution.
It turns out that they were talking about bonding.
So the first step was to consider,
was to convince TELUS that I actually needed two residential lines to my house.
So I got two of the 50 down, 10 up packages,
and the installers helped me run the phone lines to my server room,
insisting the whole time that they'd be back in a week to take one of them out,
when I found out that this wasn't going to work.
This all took place back when I was doing the conclusion of personal rig update 2016.
Next, I plugged both of those ADSL modems into this,
and I was able to connect them to a black box,
it's not actually black, I'm just calling it that because it's a mystery,
that ITEL calls the Bonder.
They actually have ones with six ports that can handle up to five connections,
and 900 megabit symmetrical traffic,
but mine is a fairly basic one designed for two internet connections,
then a single connection back to my router,
which after configuring my new static IP,
something the TELUS techs also insisted wouldn't work,
manages the rest of my network,
and it works exactly the way it normally would.
ITEL asked for about an hour or so to do some tuning,
then I downloaded a game off steam,
and boom, 10 megabyte per second downloads,
as though I was on a single connection.
But how can that be?
For things like downloading large files,
or watching streaming video,
I mean, I could imagine that ITEL's box could have like large buffers inside of it,
allowing it to sort of sort and reassemble the data,
but that kind of solution would work terribly for real-time applications like online games,
and they insisted it wouldn't add much latency even,
which turned out to be true.
Well, it's actually a lot closer to alternate frame rendering SLI
than it is to how a load balancing router would work.
Instead of being based on a user session,
individual packets are actually divided completely,
between the two connections.
So my game data stream, full of bunny hops and headshots,
goes into the black box, which splits it evenly,
sends it across the internet to ITEL's nearest data center,
for me that's in Vancouver,
where a much more powerful box called an aggregator
sorts it out, accounting for small differences in delivery time,
and forwards it, in order, to wherever it's supposed to go.
At least that's how it works when you have two identifiers.
There is some more latency and bandwidth overhead involved in bonding connections with different speeds,
let's say a 20 megabit and a 10 megabit,
and bonding grossly different connections,
like a 50 meg and 5 meg, isn't recommended at all,
but for my application, it is perfect.
And it works exactly the same way in reverse.
Any game, website, or online service I use has no idea that I'm on a telecom,
or that I can use it.
connection at all, and only sees my static IP. It does cost money, like I said. The service is
billed completely separately from the connections that you're bonding, a couple hundred dollars a
month over the standalone cost in my case. But there's other cool stuff too. With multiple links,
you can operate in bonding mode, failover mode, or something in between. So you could have like
two bonded ADSL lines, and then a failover LTE line that could switch seamlessly without losing
any uptime, and other business-grade stuff. We actually have an affiliate link to ITEL for the
service below the video, like QoS services that prioritize VoIP traffic that can be done at the
aggregator level. But for me, I just wanted to stack data limits and bandwidth caps, something
that could be very useful for enthusiast consumers, and especially small businesses.
Apparently, I'm not a big fan of the idea of a stack data limit, but I'm a big fan of the idea of
festivals and movie shoots are actually asking them to bond together multiple LTE-A connections
to get ballin' 500 megabit internet in locations where there aren't any wires. And unlike some of
the other ways to get a better connection without spending, you know, it could be tens of thousands
of dollars on a fiber installation, it actually works.
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So thanks for watching guys.
If this video sucked, you know what to do,
but if it was awesome, get subscribed,
hit that like button,
or even consider checking out the link
in the video description to where to buy the stuff
we've talked about, usually on Amazon,
but in this case, it'll be the ITEL link
I referred to before.
Also in the video description, we've got our merch tour.
We've got our forum,
which you can join and discuss with people.
I've actually got our old
non-Amazon affiliate compliant outro here.
This is a video I had started a long time ago
and not finished.
So that's why this is coming across kind of awkward,
but awkwardness over now, video done, bye.