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