my question ive heard of shotguning phonelines where you get bunch of modems and hook em up to a bunch of modems on the computer, and if its all from the same ISP you could share the lines aka one line get income, other line get outgoing etc... only if the isp supported it, if not you could do some sort of load balancing.

anyway my question is in my dorm at college we have two ethernet plugin ports, and i got one gigabit ethernet on my motherboard, and another one in form of a card, and i'm wondering if i couldn't somehow do some sort of load balancing/shotguning my two ethernet card, the reason is the college ethernet is only 100mb/sec and i got a pair of gigabit and i would like to double my bandwidth to something like 200mb/sec

is this possiable?

no. Your college ethernet runs at 100mb/s. If you get two gigabit ethernet cards and hook 'em up, they're still going to run at 100mb/s. Probably slower. Each node that goes on that network decreases the speed of the overall network (dependant, of course, how much bandwidth each node is taking up.) Most college campuses have a pretty high network load. If you had two separate connections going to different places (ie, one gigabit hits your dorm switch, the other hits some other outbound network, not going through your campus connection) then it could potentially be faster. Depends where exactly the bottlenecks in your network are. (over utilized switches, or probably an over utilized backbone)

"shotgunning" works with PPP because it's slow (analog). If you give yourself two phone lines, then one only has to worry about upstream and the other downstream. CAT5 doesn't have this problem (it uses 2 or 4 wires for rx/tx.)

ah i see, thanks so i take it it wouldn't be that useful for me in my case. oh well i can just give up that second ethernet hook up and let my dorm roomate hookup hehe was planning on geting a 2rd card so i would have 3 ports so i would have an combited/meged bandwidth of 200mb/sec and 3rd port for roommate to hookup to limit him to 50mb/sec

well, you could actually load balance the 2 lines for failover, get a 3rd NIC and plug in a hub for your roomate so you can share the line. Seems like a lot of trouble but would be a worthwhile learning experience.