Windows 7 hotspot hacker turns to software bonding The company responsible for hacking a Wi-Fi hotspot into Windows 7 is turning its hand to software bonding, promising tens of megabits over the slowest of cellular connections. The company has prototype Windows code which can bond multiple IP connections into a single stream, merging multiple Wi-Fi, cellular or physical …
I'm pretty sure this was a built-in Linux functionality years ago. Admittedly less user-friendly, but this was Linux years ago.
Nice of a 3rd party to allow Microsoft's operating system to play catch-up to the 1990s. Maybe they can hack a decent UI into Windows 8 next?
What you linked is interface bonding. That's the easy way to do it when you have multiple physical interfaces on the same network. What you have to do in a case of aggregating multiple connections locally is equal-cost-multipath routing that round-robins your requests across multiple interfaces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-cost_multi-path_routing
This isn't too useful for ordinary browsing, but it is useful for things like torrenting because that opens many connections to many different servers, so relatively decent load balancing is achieved.
This feature, too, has been in Linux kernel for well over a decade.
There would be a market for multi-path VPN links which would automatically configure themselves and adapt to changing network capacities. One idea might be to split it up to a lot of TCP/IP connections. Perhaps >3 connections per physical connection. That way even if one of those connections would hang because of a lost packet, you'd still use it. Those TCP/IP connections would automatically adapt to the available bandwidth.
Knowing how much bandwidth you have at a given time is important since then you have control over which packets to throw away.
Proper connection bonding requires some aggregation at the other end of the link as well, which is the service referred to in the article. That costs money.
I have set up similar things in the past for some special purposes. This technique has always been possible, but it will make little if any difference to single-user web browsing, streaming or downloading from a server.
The only noticeable advantage would be with something like a torrent download which connects to multiple sources. Or by segregating different types of traffic. This becomes more relevant when considering a multi-user or corporate network's connection, strangely such a case isn't mentioned by Connectify.
With how many assets are downloaded invididually for a typical web page, and for how many domains they span, I think this could actually speed up single-user web browsing. Especially if we're talking about slow-ish connections like public Wi-Fi and 3G.
First, try blocking ads.
Then, if you can take the regular browsing breakages (I can) try disabling jscript.
The difference is remarkable.
Also flash ads are a massive load on your cpu, basically one flash ad can tie up an entire core when it gets going.
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