FTTC - Bonding lines - anyone have any experience or opinions?

[pollaxe]

I'm hoping some of you tech-savvy chaps and chapesses might be able to help me out.

I live in rural Herefordshire, last year we were upgraded to fibre (FTTC) and I average around 15 mbps (a big improvement from the 512 kbps - 2.5 mbps we used to get) in speed. However, our line is unreliable, we often get faults (we've been on reduced speed and intermittent call availability since 14th December) and they have no plans to upgrade our area further (they've also gone all around us with FTTP. Grrrr!) We're at some distance from the cabinet (I've never been told how far) but I reckon 1.3-1.6 km away.

I've thus been wondering about getting another telephone line put in and then maybe bond both connections during good times and to have a failover if one goes squiffy.

Is that a viable choice? I'm with Zen and they don't support bonding, so it would be with another ISP and I believe Arnold and Andrews offer bonded connections, but this option appears to be expensive. I've seen things like Sharedband, Speedify and Connectify are available but others have suggested that a dedicated router which bonds the connection might be the way to go.

Does anyone have any advice or experience? I don't think that I have any other option but an additional line (we only have FTTC available to us, we have no wireless providers, no mobile coverage and I'd avoid satellite where possible.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[SUMMONER]

intermittent call availability

Keep in mind that if one BT line in the house goes dead, it will almost certainly happen to the other one too.

Line bonding has to be directly supported by the ISP, since they need to have the appropriate setup at their end as well.

If you want to use multiple Internet connections, in case one fails or to increase the overall available bandwidth (eg: 2 x ADSL/VDSL lines + 3G/4G Mobile Internet), a "relatively" inexpensive Draytek Vigor 2860 router will do that for you.
Notice that this is different to "bonding" 2 x ADSL/VDSL connections. Bonding will combine the 2 connections, creating a single faster connection. The load balancing/fail over features of the Draytek router makes use of each individual broadband connection as needed, but it does not combine their speeds for a single download (eg: you can have 2 x 15Mbit downloads, but not 1 x 30Mbit download).

I would suggest you give BroadbandBuyer a call, their staff are very clued up and tend to be eager to give advise.

[watercooled]

Sometimes load balancing can improve speeds for single downloads, depending on the type - it's quite possible to have multiple data streams per download, this is how the download booster (or whatever it's called) feature works on some smartphones like Apple/Samsung - they combine bandwidth from WiFi and cellular to improve speed for large downloads.

However WRT the OP's question, I agree that bonding two VDSL lines probably won't achieve what you're after and that faults will generally affect both lines as they run pretty much parallel back to the cabinet and DSLAM. However if there's a fault on your current line then it's possible it could be resolved with a technician visit as there might be water getting into a junction somewhere for instance.

[pollaxe]

Cheers both, our phone is still off and no estimate as to when it'll be fixed. The area is terrible, one neighbour has just been reconnected after a week, another was off for months. We truly live in the armpit of technology. Openreach are supposed to be fixing the issues we are having but I'm not holding my breath.

I've been in touch with BroadbandBuyer and I noticed that they're a Sharedband provider, so that may well be an option for me. I'll see what they say.

[peterb]

As others have said, it may be an infrastructure problem, so even though you change your ISP to one that supports bonding, you are still relying on the existing infrastructure, so unless you go with a wireless system (either cell based of satellite) you may notice a speed improvement (although you will be adversely affecting the contention ratio) you may not improve reliability, and you will be paying for two telephone lines.

Direct satellite is an option, although latency and data caps can be issues,depending on what you are doing.

[pollaxe]

Unfortunately, there are no wireless carriers in the area and there's no mobile signal either (I've only just got a femtocell from 3 so we can use our phones here.)

I used to have an ISDN line into the place and that stayed on when the other line played up. A friend has used satellite and I've heard nothing but negative feedback from him and it was something I looked into when we were stuck on even lower speeds but the advice I kept getting was to avoid satellite if you possibly can.

There are four people in the house who use the connection, so we can divvy up the costs between us. I'll see what the Sharedband options might be. We did use bonded ADSL in work some years ago and that worked okay but there was a probably a better infrastructure (it's in a larger town.) Openreach have been spotted in the area this morning, so hopefully they're working on the fault.

[watercooled]

As you've said though, your line is down and so are your neighbours', and if you're bonding, not only are you going to be sharing a DSLAM, you're also likely sharing a line card. The only things that will be separate will be the physical wires back to your house, and unless it's something like water ingress or rodents affecting one of the lines but not the other, pretty much any technical fault will affect both lines.

The idea with broadband failover is to have two ideally separate connections e.g. one BT, one Virgin as faults are highly unlikely to affect both connections, but with bonded connections from one ISP the chances of it helping are fairly slim.

ISDN was generally treated differently and with a higher priority on uptime vs domestic connections.

They might try to sell you a bonded connection regardless of if they think it will work - I'd see if they're prepared to offer some sort of trial period to prove their confidence. Your speed should improve though, unless contention is bad as peterb says.

Can't you get cellular connectivity even from e.g. in your loft or on any network? I've been to places in the Lakes where literally only Vodafone have a 2G signal.

[pollaxe]

No, there's nothing viable in terms of mobile signal; we're in a valley, the hill opposite us is a big one and blocks just about everything. It used to be the same with television signal, we were early adopters of Sky because our picture was rubbish and when the leaves came out in spring, it got worse. If I walk for about three minutes there is 3G but nowhere near the property. There are places in the garden where you can sometimes get a fleeting 2G connection but not enough to be reliable (and as far as I'm aware, the phone networks are all capped anyway, aren't they?)

The neighbours aren't off at the moment, it's just us but the area isn't a good one but they are supposed to be investigating and sorting our area. We were off a couple of years ago for about ten days and the engineer who finally tracked it down reckoned it was due to lightning damage. Supposedly the surrounding area has had a lot of its infrastructure improved; annoying, we're very close to FTTP but it's for a different exchange. It's literally all around us.

What I'm looking at presently is Sharedband, so it would be two lines, two separate ISPs and they handle the traffic (so there are three lots in the mix.) I get that there's a chance there'll be an issue with both lines in the event of a fault - would type more but I have to rush off to meet up with an old friend!

[DanceswithUnix]

I can see bonding getting you the performance of the slowest line of the two if you are dropping packets (which it sounds like you might be) as if *either* line drops a packet then the data stream that was interrupted will go into congestion avoidance mode and drop to a slower speed where it can start speeding up from again. Kind of twice as much to go wrong.

Also, if you are getting 15Mb/sec then that is reasonably fast. Thanks to the way that modern web designers put lots of effort into defeating TCP/IP congestion control you can pretty much guarantee that looking at a web page will swamp some poor router along the way so web browsing really doesn't benefit from more than a few Mbit. Things like Steam downloads are nice, but generally upgrading our house from 8Mbit to 40 really wasn't all that noticeable.

I think you just need to shout at BT until they get your 15Mbit stable. I found last time I was on BT with ADSL problems they didn't give a hoot, but when I complained that the voice service was unusable (you could hardly hear the person at the other end) they stirred their stumps. Unfortunately I don't think other ISPs are any better at kicking Openreach into action.

[watercooled]

What I'm looking at presently is Sharedband, so it would be two lines, two separate ISPs and they handle the traffic (so there are three lots in the mix.)

Any ISP you go with will be using the exact same Openreach infrastructure in the 'last mile' i.e. the DSLAM, physical cables, backhaul to the exchange, etc. The only exceptions to this are Virgin's cable service and a couple of the rural ISPs with their own physical networks.

[SUMMONER]

I wouldn't bother with Shareband. It doesn't include the costs of the actual broadband and after the initial costs you would be paying £120+VAT a year per broadband connection for the privilege of the line bonding, even while the Internet/phone is not working.

Spend the money saved on a phone line from BT Business, instead of another residential line, and put BT Business Infinity Unlimited on it. Because of your location BT will not be able to achieve the 6hours/1 day/2 days response/fault fixing targets, but you will always be at the top of the priority list, so should have your problems fixed before everyone else.

If you like the idea of having more bandwidth and some sort of automatic fail over get a dual WAN router for a one of cost.

[pollaxe]

Thanks for all the advice; just to let you know that nothing is resolved as we are still off (since December 14th, 2015!). I have got our MP involved and an allegedly high-level chap at BT has been telling me for the past three weeks that Openreach will fix the fault very soon and it's at the highest level of priority.

Pfft.

[Mucka]

What is your
Line Attenuation
&
Noise Margin

Could you improve your existing connection? moving the router to master socket? better cable?