Is it possible to merge two internet connections by using two modems and connecting them to a single router?

Question

Our summer house is in a place where we can only get about a 50 mbps connection and since there are often 10 people in the house all using the same wifi network I was wondering whether it is possible to get another line from the ISP and merge the two into one single wifi network by connecting two modems to a single router? I have a ubiquity unify network with a router and a whole bunch of access points to cover the whole house.

Solution

The answer to this is a classic "yes and no".

It is not possible without the active participation of your ISP to make the two 50Mbps lines appear as a single 100Mbps line, but it definitly is possible to load-balance between two lines in a way, that the sum of all internet consumption reaches (close to) 100Mbps.

Basically what load balancing does, is make use of the fact, that most Internet usage is not a big Download of many Megabytes (which would be limited to a single line), but a lot of smaller requests. By channeling those through different lines, they appear to be much faster.

If you want a Firewall/Router that makes this easy, check out pfSense.

Comments

[John]

Not really, but you could have two wireless points. Make them different and the logically odds are people will pick up what is near them, or, what gives them a readily available connection

[Jasper amirante]

And assuming that the traffic is comprised of lots of separate users streaming video or doing usual small tasks this would feel like a single twice as fast signal?

[dan]

Depends on contention for bandwidth. A single user downloading a single stream is likely to use only one of the two connections, unless the implementation is sophisticated, including to upstream bonding of the separate links. Two or more users downloading heavily at the same time will likely see improvement.

[user1686]

It's also not that uncommon for a single "download" to use multiple connections -- it used to be done by download managers in the past, things like BitTorrent nowadays, and even some browsers (Chrome) plan to add this for standard HTTP downloads in near future. (Though there is no guarantee that they will be distributed across both links -- depends on whether the router does it based on actual load or just based on a hash...)