Is *single file* upload speed actually increased?

MadDogDean

Hello all,
I'm trying to figure out if the information somebody else provided/explained is correct.

I have 2 ISP connections. They get (albeit pathetic!!) 1.5 Mbps download and 0.25 Mbps upload. The ISP connection is on a Canopy network.

If I use multi-WAN on pfSense for these two incoming lines, will I actually achieve 0.50 Mbps upload speeds when uploading a large single file, such as a 300 MB photo to DropBox or other online storage.

Of course the up/down speeds are not guaranteed and this ISP is pretty flaky, but assuming that the Speedtest.net numbers above were written in stone, will pfSense do this?

Thanks,
Dean

EDIT: Clarification

chpalmer

No. You are limited by the highest speed of your fastest connection.

You could try to accomplish some kind of bonding such as mlppp but your ISP has to be onboard and able.

johnpoz

If you were using an upload method where there were multiple streams and sent the streams via your 2 different source IPs then yes it would be possible to increase the speed.

Good luck with that.. I don't think for example drop box is going do that.. Where you could see increase in over all upload would be with say something like torrents.. Here you would be sending files to multiple dest.. And even in theory you could be sending a part to dest A from your isp 1 and same time from isp 2 connection.

Multiple wan connections allow you to load share across both connections, so your overall bandwidth is increased when looked at all your clients on your network as a whole. But no a specific upload/download over 1 stream could only ever be as fast as your single connection.

MadDogDean

Thanks to you both. That was my thought, but I needed to clarify it.

Sometimes you're not sure of the "magic in the box" and what it does, but it's always slight of hand and very seldom "magic"!

Happy New Year to all!

Dean

jasonlitka

There are ways to do this without your ISP's cooperation, but you'd need an off-site server, preferably something very close to you to minimize the latency penalty, but I've never tried it with pfSense.

Here's a how-to for Linux (though I really wouldn't recommend using SSH to create the tunnels since you'd be doing TCP over TCP and also need to connect as root on the remote box).

http://simonmott.co.uk/vpn-bonding

I don't know that it's worth the effort to turn 2x 1.5/0.25 into 3.0/0.5 though, not unless you really need the extra for a single connection vs. routing different users across each pipe and can't afford the next step up from your ISP. I remember having 7.0/768 years ago from Verizon over DSL and I was something like 9500 ft from the CO so I'd really be surprised if a WISP couldn't do better today. You should never let 15-year-old Verizon tech show you up.

Mathiasw

I use the bonding solution from SharedBand for this. Works perfectly.

timveer

Delete - wrong topic