Mutiple ethernet cards to reduce lag/ping?

[Twisted_Firestarter]

Does anyone know much about using multiple ethernet cards in a single pc? Here's my scenario, I am often travelling and so find myself playing online from hotel rooms. Most of the rooms typically have wireless high-speed internet connections and they almost always have fairly low bandwidth caps. Being the bandwidth whore that I am, I've been pondering adding a second ethernet card to my PC, my theory being that there is probably some way to aggregate dual ethernet cards allowing me greater bandwidth and reducing my ping/lag when playing online. But, I'm not sure if this would work in fact since I think game server connections are ip-to-ip, i.e. only a single ethernet adapter would be connecting to the game server. Although dual-NICs would probably help for things like playing online while downloading, I'm thinking it won't make a difference as far as lag/ping in-game is concerned.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[CK]

almost always have fairly low bandwidth caps

How low?

BF1942 even with large numbers of users ingame only uses around 8 KB/s down and 3-5 KB/s up (64 kbps down and 24-40 kbps up). I'm guessing that you are very unlikely to have a serious bottleneck in "your share" of the hotel's bandwidth.

And besides that, I'm pretty sure that the game server just won't be able to handle it at all, it'll confuse the heck out of it. In fact I'm certain that even the game client won't handle it (you'll have two local IPs, unless the game client is built so as to be able to use both, it won't, it'll only use one).

Multi-homing is only useful when the external connections are "coming in" to a hostname that is properly "multi-homed" and using a service that is listening to both interfaces and can handle it. You'd have to get further details about that from Apo or someone who knows more about that kind of stuff. I just know enough to be pretty sure it won't work for gaming.

You'd be better off packing a cantenna and seeing if you can find any other wireless networks out your window/balcony with a higher signal to noise ratio with high bandwidth and lower latency internet connections. The cantenna might even improve your local hotel connection latency and bandwidth (if it happens to be bad in a given room, what with all the concrete walls and such).

Cheers,

[Overlag]

none at all...compleat waste of time (for the uses you've said)

[Twisted_Firestarter]

Thanks for the input guys. I wasn't very hopeful, but this hotel has such crappy latency that I'm grabbing at straws. Maybe I'll switch hotels next week.

I've never heard of a cantenna, I'll check it out. Thanks!

[CK]

http://www.cantenna.com/store.html

[Apophis]

Are you sure that's not just a pringles can with a plug on it? :-)

[Benny_]

Originally Posted by Apophis

Are you sure that's not just a pringles can with a plug on it? :-)

Not a bad mark-up though is it?!

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448

Now if I could just be bothered to paint some pringles tubes a pretty silver colour and sell them......

[Overlag]

Originally Posted by Apophis

Are you sure that's not just a pringles can with a plug on it? :-)

alot of people make these with pringle cans

[TheFeniX]

Originally Posted by Overlag

alot of people make these with pringle cans

My co-worker told me once that there was a can from a certain brand of Chile (hormel maybe) that made the best one.

Some 3COM NICs (the 3C905C-TX-M in particular) will allow multi-plexing (I think that's the right term), but even if you had access to ALL the bandwidth in a single T1 (1.5 Mb/s) your one NIC is still 66.66 times faster. Considering (like was already posted) how little is used to connect to the server, adding another NIC would do squat. The bottleneck is not your PC, but the backbone to the ISP.

Linking two NICs together is used primarily in high-volume File Servers. Also, I believe the switch you connect to would also need support for this. So unless they're running a couple of Cisco 2924's it's doubtful it'd work.