2 internet connections at once?

Hi, I have 2 broadband services. One is a 1mbps BT ADSL service (I'm out in the sticks) and the other is a 20mbps satellite service.
I use the BT connection via ethernet for my work (using VPN) - and satellite on all the other computers in the house. However I would like to be able to use the satellite connection on the same laptop as the BT/VPN connection, for downloading large files that I need for work, which would take an age over BT. I have tried using VPN on the satellite link and it performs really badly. Is there any way I can connect to both at the same time using my ethernet and wifi, and direct traffic to one or the other depending on IP address?
Thanks

It is possible but you would need to manually configure routes for the network cards. If you don't want to learn quite a lot about networking then you may not want to try and get into doing this.

You'll end up needing to know things like this

It is possibly the latency that causes the performance issues. The VPN may to work too well so keeps disconnecting, and then re-establishing the connection - I have seen it many tomes before. Some, VPN systems will allow for a parameter change to improve operation across the link - your IT department should be the first port of call.

As for connecting to both simultaneously - you will NOT be able to establish a VPN on both as the server will see you twice and may flag up a potential security breach.

In reply to a post by MHC:

It is possibly the latency that causes the performance issues. The VPN may to work too well so keeps disconnecting, and then re-establishing the connection - I have seen it many tomes before. Some, VPN systems will allow for a parameter change to improve operation across the link - your IT department should be the first port of call.

His problem is likely that it's an L2TP VPN which will not work with the TCP acceleration the satcom router does, so TCP traffic will never get out of TCP slow start and will pootle along at ~300kbps max.

Solution would be an SSL vpn (e.g. Cisco Anyconnect).

As for the rest of the query, you could use a Draytek router (e.g. 2830, 2860, 2920, 2925) and connect the ADSL to Wan1 and vSat to Wan2.

Then set a load balance policy to send traffic to your VPN endpoint (whatever server at work you use) over the ADSL link, and either let it load balance the rest, or send everything else down the vsat.

You might find while on the VPN that the machine you are using for the VPN has to disconnect from VPN to use the vsat connection still, if your work have not enabled split tunnelling.

If you have a dedicated machine, connect both connections to it and install Connectify Dispatch.

Then install a proxy server and configure each and every other computer to use that proxy server.

I did it in my first year of uni to load balance the 100Mbps connection provided via the wall socket and the WiFi connection we had.

Worked lovely! Not sure what the performance will be like with the satellite connection though...