Double or Triple Your Internet Speed - This Method Actually Works!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,761 words · ~8 min read
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What if I told you that you can double, triple, or even quadruple your internet speed with one easy trick?
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Well, you'd probably say,
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Yeah, I've heard that before!
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This asshole told me to duct tape my belt to my network cable,
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then laughed at me when my pants fell down.
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But wait!
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This time it's actually real!
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Our internet service provider here at Linus Media Group,
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ITEL Networks, sent us this fancy box
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that allows you to bond together multiple internet connections
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in what is effectively internet SLI.
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And I've been using it for the last three months.
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So let's talk about some pretty cool network magic and how it works.
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GFuel is the sugar-free alternative energy beverage
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to maintain focus and endurance over long days and gaming sessions.
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Save some money,
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using code Linus at the link in the video description.
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Let's get this out of the way.
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Bonded internet is faster,
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but it is not free.
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If you've tried the free ways to get faster internet,
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you'll know that they don't work anyway, though,
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so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
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So what's the point of making this video?
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And what is the point of bonding at all then, Linus?
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If I wanted a faster internet connection,
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I could just buy a faster internet connection like you did.
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No voodoo required.
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Well,
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there are a number of reasons,
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but I'll start with mine,
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since it actually covers a few of the most common ones.
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Now, the office here is fine,
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but at my house,
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at the time of setting this up,
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the fastest download speed I could get was 100 megabit,
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and the fastest upload speed available on a residential ADSL or cable line was 10 megabit,
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which is great for uploading the odd cat video to Facebook,
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but I have experienced some data loss scares recently,
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but I have experienced some data loss scares recently,
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but I have experienced some data loss scares recently,
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but I have experienced some data loss scares recently,
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but I have experienced some data loss scares recently,
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but I have experienced some data loss scares recently,
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and I wanted to set up an off-site backup for my storage box,
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meaning that I could easily be transferring multiple gigs of data in a single day.
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And there's also the issue of dynamic IP addresses.
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Even fairly basic uses,
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like hosting an FTP file server,
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require a static IP address to avoid unexpected downtime,
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not included with most residential connections.
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And then further complicating matters,
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many ISPs,
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also block some of the common ports associated with hosting websites,
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mail servers,
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or what have you.
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Now you might think then that the obvious solution would be to get a business connection.
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But while that would give me a static IP and all of my ports open for running servers or whatever,
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those cost significantly more than the residential ones,
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and to my shock and awe,
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are no faster,
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or in Telus' case,
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not even available in my area at the same speeds.
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So given then that a fiber build out to my house would cost about as much as a new car,
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ITEL suggested ordering multiple cheaper residential connections to my house and combining them.
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But the only way that I was aware of that that could work is with a load balancing router.
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It's a relatively affordable piece of hardware,
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but one that's considered more appropriate for failover,
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in the event that one connection goes down,
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or for distributing net traffic across multiple users.
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Like, for example,
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if two users are trying to watch two 4 megabit streams,
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that could work with two 5 megabit connections.
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But if one user was trying to stack those two 5 megabit connections,
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and watch a single 8 megabit video stream,
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load balancing would not be the solution.
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It turns out that they were talking about bonding.
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So the first step was to consider,
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was to convince TELUS that I actually needed two residential lines to my house.
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So I got two of the 50 down, 10 up packages,
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and the installers helped me run the phone lines to my server room,
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insisting the whole time that they'd be back in a week to take one of them out,
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when I found out that this wasn't going to work.
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This all took place back when I was doing the conclusion of personal rig update 2016.
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Next, I plugged both of those ADSL modems into this,
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and I was able to connect them to a black box,
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it's not actually black, I'm just calling it that because it's a mystery,
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that ITEL calls the Bonder.
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They actually have ones with six ports that can handle up to five connections,
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and 900 megabit symmetrical traffic,
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but mine is a fairly basic one designed for two internet connections,
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then a single connection back to my router,
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which after configuring my new static IP,
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something the TELUS techs also insisted wouldn't work,
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manages the rest of my network,
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and it works exactly the way it normally would.
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ITEL asked for about an hour or so to do some tuning,
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then I downloaded a game off steam,
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and boom, 10 megabyte per second downloads,
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as though I was on a single connection.
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But how can that be?
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For things like downloading large files,
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or watching streaming video,
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I mean, I could imagine that ITEL's box could have like large buffers inside of it,
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allowing it to sort of sort and reassemble the data,
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but that kind of solution would work terribly for real-time applications like online games,
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and they insisted it wouldn't add much latency even,
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which turned out to be true.
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Well, it's actually a lot closer to alternate frame rendering SLI
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than it is to how a load balancing router would work.
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Instead of being based on a user session,
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individual packets are actually divided completely,
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between the two connections.
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So my game data stream, full of bunny hops and headshots,
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goes into the black box, which splits it evenly,
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sends it across the internet to ITEL's nearest data center,
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for me that's in Vancouver,
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where a much more powerful box called an aggregator
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sorts it out, accounting for small differences in delivery time,
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and forwards it, in order, to wherever it's supposed to go.
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At least that's how it works when you have two identifiers.
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There is some more latency and bandwidth overhead involved in bonding connections with different speeds,
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let's say a 20 megabit and a 10 megabit,
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and bonding grossly different connections,
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like a 50 meg and 5 meg, isn't recommended at all,
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but for my application, it is perfect.
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And it works exactly the same way in reverse.
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Any game, website, or online service I use has no idea that I'm on a telecom,
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or that I can use it.
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connection at all, and only sees my static IP. It does cost money, like I said. The service is
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billed completely separately from the connections that you're bonding, a couple hundred dollars a
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month over the standalone cost in my case. But there's other cool stuff too. With multiple links,
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you can operate in bonding mode, failover mode, or something in between. So you could have like
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two bonded ADSL lines, and then a failover LTE line that could switch seamlessly without losing
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any uptime, and other business-grade stuff. We actually have an affiliate link to ITEL for the
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service below the video, like QoS services that prioritize VoIP traffic that can be done at the
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aggregator level. But for me, I just wanted to stack data limits and bandwidth caps, something
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that could be very useful for enthusiast consumers, and especially small businesses.
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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
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festivals and movie shoots are actually asking them to bond together multiple LTE-A connections
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to get ballin' 500 megabit internet in locations where there aren't any wires. And unlike some of
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the other ways to get a better connection without spending, you know, it could be tens of thousands
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of dollars on a fiber installation, it actually works.
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Anyway, for unrestricted 30 day full access as a free trial,
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head over to freshbooks.com slash tech tips
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and enter Linus Tech Tips
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in the how you heard about us section.
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So thanks for watching guys.
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If this video sucked, you know what to do,
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but if it was awesome, get subscribed,
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hit that like button,
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or even consider checking out the link
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in the video description to where to buy the stuff
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we've talked about, usually on Amazon,
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but in this case, it'll be the ITEL link
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I referred to before.
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Also in the video description, we've got our merch tour.
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We've got our forum,
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which you can join and discuss with people.
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I've actually got our old
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non-Amazon affiliate compliant outro here.
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This is a video I had started a long time ago
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and not finished.
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So that's why this is coming across kind of awkward,
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but awkwardness over now, video done, bye.