Any way to combine 2 slow ISP's to increase speed?

[BUSNUT8040]

I have 2 ISP's, 1st is a cable modem with 3.5 mbps d/l speed & 2nd is AT&T wireless with an avg d/l of 9.5 mbps.  I use a Cradlepoint MBR95 router.  Is there anyway to "combine" these 2 slow ISP's to increase my overall download speed?  Yea, you read right... Spectrum/Time Warner cable, but my cost is $15/mo. unlimited (old old grandfathered plan).  I need this in my home to connect my HVAC system to the internet when we travel.  The AT&T is wireless I use on the road when we travel in our motorcoach.  It too is unlimited data costing $24/mo.  I have the AT&T Connected Car Plan (ZTE Mobley modem).  With my AT&T I can stream HD video just fine.  Have hit 150 GB usage/mo with no problems from AT&T (traveling in our motorcoach, so hitting many towers/many states).  Any suggestions?  Have been a TM member for 15+ years now.  Many thanks, Steve.

[Sean]

Check if the MBR95's modem is LTE capable.  If it's not, I suggest buying an unlocked LTE router and putting your SIM in it.  If it needs configuration (some auto configure based on the SIM), you can copy the APN settings from your current router.  If it's already LTE capable, it may be worth getting an outdoor directional antenna for it, such as a pair of LOG antennas. 

 

If you can get (or improve) LTE reception on the router, that will likely offer a far greater speed increase than trying to combine the two Internet services.

 

To combine two internet connections, you would either need a load balancing router or a bandwidth aggregator service, both which have their pros and cons:

 

With a load balancing router, you would connect both Internet connections to the router's WAN ports.  When you access the Internet, the router will automatically split the web connections across the two ports.  There are two drawbacks to watch out for - Individual connections such as a file download will run at the speed of whichever port the router routed it out, so if the router happened to run it on the port with the 3.5Mbps connection, your download will be stuck at that speed until it completes.  Another issue is that some web services may not be happy seeing traffic from two different IPs from the one login.

 

With a bandwidth aggregation service, you would have both Internet connections set up on your PC (e.g. using two Ethernet adapeters) and the service would split the traffic over both connections and recombine it on its server.  This offers the advantage of being able to get the full capacity of both connections with a single download and a single WAN IP (issued from that Bandwidth aggregation provider).  However, the drawback is that you'll need to pay for this Bandwidth aggregation provider and there will be additional latency as with using a VPN connection.