Connectify & Speedify

I'm Alex from Connectify, so I guess I should answer this:

Connectify Dispatch (Connectify Dispatch - The Software Internet Load Balancer)
is a smart load balancer for Windows.
It detects all of the internet connections on your system, then runs a brief tes
t on each one to determine the bandwidth,
latency and reliability on each connection. Then every time that an applicatio
n on your system opens a new socket
Dispatch jumps in, and makes a fast decision about which Internet connection to
route that socket out on.
Under the covers there are a couple pieces: There's a "filter driver" that pull
s packets out of the Internet connection
Windows tried to sent it on, and then when the NAT is done with the packet, ins
erts it back into the Internet connection
that Dispatch wants you to use. So of course, there's also a full blown NAT (N
etwork Address Translation) under the
covers of Dispatch, so that it can rewrite the headers of your packets to set t
he IP headers to get them to go in and out
of the correct Internet connections.
Dispatch also has per-application settings, you can set rules to only allow cert
ain applicatio
ns to go out certain Internet connections. This can be useful to ensure that ba
ndwidth hungry apps don't use up all your
expensive bandwidth. These become rules for the NAT, which it uses to decide h
ow to rewrite the packets.
This approach is extremely effective with multisocket applications like web brow
sing, download managers and bittorrent.
It is less effective for uploads, video streams and VPNs which tend to do all
of their work over a single socket.
For these kinds of applications we're now working on Connectify Switchboard, w
hich can divide up your traffic on a
packet-by-packet basis, but that's kind of another topic
Speedify is actually a VPN that creates tunnels on all of your Internet adapters
. It measures the bandwidth, latency, reliability and jitter of each of them, an
d then uses that to divide your traffic packet-by-packet between the adapters. I
t's not a load balancer: it's channel bonding.
Setting up round robin via managing routes will spread your sockets evenly betwe
en all of your Internet adapters. If one fails, its sockets are all broken, and
the next sockets will be created on still working Internet connections. There ar
e a couple problems with this approach: 1) sockets are divided evenly between ad
apters even if the adapters are not the same speed, 2) If an adapter gets discon
nected all of its sockets are broken, and 3) there's no relationship between soc
kets and traffic, some sockets send 1KB and some send gigabytes, and you won't k
now till afterwords. Most obviously this means that round robin is of no help at
all with streaming video: Netflix for example, will send you 3.5 GB over a sing
le socket while watching a movie.
Speedify addresses those issues with its channel bonding VPN approach. It doesn'
t work on sockets, it works on the packets that they're made of, so it can will
take a single socket and split it across multiple adapters. This is important fo
r things like those Netflix streaming videos. It can also actually move live soc
kets off of failed adapters and onto the still working ones without breaking the
m.

This VPN position also lets us do error correction: we can detect lost packets l
ong before TCP does, and resend them before your throughput collapses. This is a
problem for a lot of Wi-Fi and satellite users.
Finally, there are a couple advanced configuration options: you can tell it to s
end every packet on every connection (first to arrive is delivered), you can tel
l it a connection is a backup that should only be used as a last resort, etc.
I hope that helps.
+++++++++++++++++++++
here is no magic solution to this problem no matter how much software want you t
o think there is. They do their very best to make claims up front and have lots
of conditions hidden in the fine print.
First all this is designed to combine 2 different internet connections. No matte
r what you do if you only buy say 5m from your ISP you will only get 5m. So if w
hat you are trying to do is use 2 different wireless nic cards to connect to the
same router you are wasting your time. Even if you could accomplish that it wil
l give you no benefit since a single wireless is almost always faster than most
people internet.
What most this is designed to do is say you have a DSL connection at 3m and a mo
bile broadband connection at 4m you can attempt to run both to attempt to use th
e 7m you pay for.
There are 2 way to do this and both have major restrictions that must be address
es.
The first way just runs some traffic on one connection and some other traffic on
the other. You for example could watch 2 normal def netflix movies at the same
time one on each connection. What you can not do is combine them together and wa
tch a hidef video stream that needs 6m.
You have 2 different IP so to everyone on the Internet it appears as though you
are 2 different people/computers. Connectify is a software that makes doing this
easier. It can all be done with the ROUTE command. In either case you really ha
ve to know what is going on and configure things. Many game programs for example
use 1 server to authenticate and another to play the game. So if you log into t
he authentication server using 1 connection and attempt to play the game with th
e other the game company will think someone is trying to hack into your account
and prevent it. No software can know how every game company or bank or whatever
is setup so you will have to constantly tune this so these groups of servers alw
ays use the same connection.
The second way is what speedify is. It attempt to hide the 2 ip address problem
by sending all the traffic to a central location and then change the IPs so both
appear to have the same ip. This actually can work fairly well if both the conn
ections are similar. The problem is that if the data is split into 2 connections
that have different delays to location. A example would be you sell a machine y
ou take apart into 2 boxes. One box you ship on a airplane to a remote city and
the other you give to a guy on a bicycle to deliver. Even though you get the fir
st box quickly you still must wait for the other one to rebuild the machine and
deliver it to the customer. It was only as fast as the slowest connection.'
This is the major issue since there always is some difference in the speed of th
e connections. This is also something you must pay someone else to do for you. Y
ou have the costs to go to the remote location to combine the 2 connections and
then a special device to solve this delay problem. What many of these VPN servic
es do to try to save money and hide the fact that you have to wait for the slowe
st connection. They just make no attempt to solve the issue of the data arriving

out of order and the large delays. This would be the same as if in my example y
ou just sent the part of the machine to the customer that was delivered by the a
irplane and never bother to tell him there was another part coming via bicycle.
The customer would get made and cancel the order and tell you to resend it.
The vast majority of these VPN connections things used to combine data have this
issue of out of order data because of the costs or putting in machines at their
location to put the data back into order. The PC interrupts this as data loss i
n the network and requests retransmission and if it gets bad enough will close t
he sessions.
It would almost be as fair to say you can't combine 2 different internet connect
ions for the people who only read the large print. The true answer is someplace
inbetween and requires a educated consumer.