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I have an ISP provided router at the perimeter and I have 1 cable connected from it towards my consumer router with bridge mode activated.

My bandwidth speed is 300mbps and upload 200mbps, and my consumer bridged router is a gigabyte supported router.

Does connecting another cable to the bridged mode router will help the internet speed by any way? Like the idea of dual NICs.

And does the bridge mode routers usually understand that they can utilize both connections for other devices to access the internet or it will only utilize one of the connections that are going to the router and ignore the 2nd one.

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Edit: my ISP router also supports gigabyte speeds. I was asking because I thought having 2 cables can help in some sort of load balancing and redundancy. But based on the answers almost always the router will utilize one cable or the other but not both at the same time which defeats the purpose and there are no real gains.

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Saud Aljaffer
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2 Answers2

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Does connecting another cable to the bridged mode router will help the internet speed by any way? Like the idea of dual NICs.

In your setup – no, likely not. (It's the same with dual NICs too.)

  • The first reason is that even a single 1 Gbps Ethernet connection already has the capacity much higher than your Internet uplink. If your ISP-supplied router already has a Gigabit Ethernet LAN, then there's no point in upgrading from 1/1 Gbps to 2/2 Gbps if your Internet connection is already less than that.

    (And if the ISP-supplied router doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet and you're trying to bond two 100 Mbps LAN ports, then I'm tempted to say that your ISP is outright ripping you off...)

  • If you do connect two cables, the result depends on which ports are bridged together. (The 'LAN' side of the ISP-supplied router almost always has all its ports bridged.) If you have two connections between two bridges, you get a loop – one that'll usually shut down the whole network quickly and will result in practically zero Gbps.

    Between two bridges that do use either standard STP or a custom loop-detection mechanism, the result would be one of the connections being temporarily disabled to break the loop while the other remains, resulting in 1 Gbps.

  • Higher-grade equipment supports link aggregation using LACP (802.3ad), which is almost "connect two cables", but the downside with it is that it'll never give you actual 2 Gbps (or 200 Mbps) – a 2× LACP connection gives you 2×1 Gbps, where you can have two simultaneous downloads at 1 Gbps but any single connection will only ever go through a single link.

    (And if you had equipment that does LACP, then most likely it would have Gigabit ports anyway, making the whole issue moot.)

    There are some other link aggregation modes ("round-robin", I think?) that do give you full 2x speed, but those are even less likely to be found in your routers.

  • If the ports on your router's side are not bridged to each other (say, if they are two independent routed ports), the usual result is that both ports will get IP addresses but only one will be used for sending data (and due to how ARP works, generally only one will end up receiving data, too); you still won't get anything more than 1x the interface speed.

    Higher-grade routers support ECMP for multipath balancing between multiple equal routes, but that too is designed in a way that has each connection "stick" to the same route the whole time.

grawity
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  1. I've done the exact setup you're describing with a cable modem and a firewall. It's called Link Aggregation, both the modem and your router would have to support 802.3ad. You would be doubling your gigabit link between the two devices, but you would not notice any speed difference unless your internet was in excess of 1gig.

  2. Unless you have a setting to enable link aggregation, your router will ignore one of those links.

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ShadyPacket
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