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A comment on Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increase your download speed.

Re:Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increa... by chacham15 on Saturday November 30, 2013 @01:39PM (#6824014)
Can anyone explain how this works? From previous experience I always thought that this was not possible without some cooperation on the other end because the problem is you want to split the data being sent to you to different ips. If the other end sends all the data to the same ip, you cannot redirect/load balance to other ips before the data actually gets to you. What am I missing?
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Re:Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increa... by wmf on Saturday November 30, 2013 @01:42PM (#6824022)
Probably each TCP connection only goes over one IP address, so the remote end doesn't get confused. All the data coming back on that connection will have to come in on the same path the connection started on.
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Re:Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increa... by chacham15 on Saturday November 30, 2013 @01:48PM (#6824044)
If that were the case, the download would be no faster than using a single connection. I guess it would help if you download multiple things, but that is a different claim than what is claimed in the title.
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Re:Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increa... by mikeash on Saturday November 30, 2013 @01:49PM (#6824047)
You can use multiple connections for a single download (e.g. HTTP range requests).
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Re:Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increa... by chacham15 on Saturday November 30, 2013 @02:02PM (#6824113)
Yes, but that is at the application layer, not the transport layer (i.e. at TCP). Meaning, you need to be aware of what is actually being sent.
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Re:Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increa... by mikeash on Saturday November 30, 2013 @02:37PM (#6824272)
Well, if you just balance TCP connections across physical connections, you could then combine this with a multi-connection HTTP download client and get the effect without any one piece having knowledge of it all (aside from the human). But yes, it's not going to be useful in general for everything.
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Re:Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increa... by anoncow16 on Saturday November 30, 2013 @01:53PM (#6824070)
I was thinking the same thing. A quick glance at the code (I don't speak js) seems it's not doing this.
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Re:Combine your Wi-Fi, Ethernet and 3G connections to increa... by p1mrx on Saturday November 30, 2013 @04:17PM (#6824659)
In theory, it's possible to load balance transparently across multiple IP addresses, provided that you have a well-connected VPS in a nearby datacenter to serve as an intermediary.

From the world's point of view, you'll be connecting from the VPS's IP address, but between you and the VPS, you can do pretty much anything with the packets.

Granted, that's now how dispatch-proxy works.

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