I am currently organizing networking infrastructure of our small research lab in CS department of my university. I am not a professional sysadmin but as a CS graduate I generally can find my way out. The switches and access points are very old like 5 to 15 years old. Since we lack funding and also our access is limited to 100 Mbps by the university/IT department, currently existing equipment is the only choice.
In the lab each table has an ethernet/WAN port which is connected to the main switch of the floor. On some desks there are plain 8-port plain un-managed switches (without WAN port) used for sharing a single WAN port between two or more computers. IPs are statically allocated by the subnet admin of the department and they are guaranteed to be in the same subnet. We also have a wireless AP/router (for phones and temporary devices) which has its own local network. However the hosts connected to the same switch sometimes create quite large amounts of traffic and fill the 100Mbps bandwith quickly while other ethernet/WAN ports in the lab aren't using much traffic. Now my question is: Is it possible to connect two WAN cables into same un-managed switch and double the bandwidth or should we install a managed switch which is capable of load-balancing two WAN ports.
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