submission by Paul Gale – In the wish to boost my upstream speeds as much as possible I did some research study into ADSL bonding or MLPPP (Multi link Pont to point Protocol). A handful of ISP’s offer support for this (they tend to be smaller business though rather than the likes of BT, Yahoo etc). After a fair bit of hunting around as well as speaking to people, I plumped for 3 x ADSL Max premium (Office) connections from a reseller, UKFSN (www.ukfsn.org), of an ISP called Enta web (www.enta.net).
UKFSN is a one guy band however crucially, all support is direct from Enta web who in my experience have a relatively great level of manning. They tend to response the phone fairly rapidly although email support can be a bit slow. Enta web won’t offer directly with little companies as well as house users, which is why a reseller comes into the equation. Enta will offer direct if you want a Cisco handled bonded router service though however this is a fair bit much more expensive.
Each of the three lines would offer me with as much as 8Mbps downstream as well as 832Kbps upstream (the house or common product provides 448Kbps upstream). The premium or office product supposedly provides higher concern to your web traffic in BT’s network together with the higher upstream speeds. Contention ratios are no longer utilized to differentiate the products on BT’s IPStream network that Max uses. Each of these lines would be bonded together utilizing MLPPP -“ both at the ISP as well as at my end utilizing a Linux based self-built PC router as well as utilizing totally free software application from FreeStuffJunction (). Each connection is plugged into a Sangoma S518 PCI ADSL modem (one for every connection), costing £112 each.
The router boots as well as runs from CD ROM or a write-protected USB pen drive, enhancing security. In my case, my old primary board didn’t support booting from USB pen drive so I utilized a hybrid service of a boot loader from CD which then hands over to the primary o/s held on the pen drive. Configuration data for the connections as well as services such as IPTables, the Linux firewall etc are held on a second pen drive. The router software application is completely featured as well as supports IPSec VPN, NAT, Firewall, Squid proxy cache, web traffic shaping, DHCP, Snort intrusion detection as well as SNMP amongst others.
Setup as well as configuration of the router was truly simple. The whole bundle is supplied as an .ISO picture as well as you just have to set a few configuration choices which take the type of a number of text data (Just the existence of the data sets the choice in many cases). when up as well as running, the router is handled by a customized version of Webmin, the Linux web based admin system. extensive understanding of linux is not needed unless you truly want to get ‘under the hood’. when all lines have been brought up as well as bonded, there are a number of reporting as well as info choices offered from Webmin. The software application likewise runs a script, inspecting on the condition of the lines as well as re-bonding if one ought to fail. So far, over the couple of months the router has been running, I’ve not had any type of problems. support from the designer as well as fellow individuals is offered totally free through a forum as well as an costly premium rate phone number if you can’t wait on a reply through the forum.
The router works on any type of old 486 as well as up PC you may have lying around. You requirement to guarantee it has sufficient PCI slots to fit the PCI ADSL cards though. The router likewise supports bonded SDSL however needs a different card type for this.
So what was I expecting from this solution? The maximum theoretical downstream rate in my situation is 24Mbps as well as upstream 2.5Mbps (approx). Of course, this is the sync speed – data throughput rates will be less because of IP overheads etc.
To get the three ADSL lines into my office, I had to migrate one existing 2Mbps service from Eclipse, convert a house highway line to analogue as well as get a third analogue line installed – rather a task – and, you guessed it, none of it went smoothly! many issues were triggered by BT failures or problems, both with their ordering systems as well as different other technical problems, including not having sufficient lines offered in my road. These issues general took a couple of months to resolve.
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Being a fairly early adopter of ADSL Max, I likewise experienced from a number of different ‘teething’ problems. One such issue was triggered by the BT network setting all three of my connections to the old 2Mbps throughput rate although the sync speeds were great at 8Mbps. This took a few weeks for support to discover out what was going on as well as resolve. one more issue was triggered by the sync rate of one of my lines being set to 6-6.5Mbps because of an earlier line fault during the preliminary 10 day period (It’s really the target SNR ratio that’s set – the modem then sets the very best speed it can with this SNR target figure). obviously a BT insider states that the DSLAM (the piece of devices in the exchange that links numerous ADSL subscribers to a single high speed ATM line) will ultimately set this rate higher however will take a number of weeks or much more to do so (the actual figures as well as details on exactly how this occurs have not been made public as the whole process is going with the patent process apparently). I lastly handled to get BT, with Enta support, to manually set this target SNR back to what it ought to be (lower is much better in this situation – well, at least to allow high speed syncs) – the line has been syncing at 8Mbps happily because It truly does pay to keep pushing a resistant support person when you understand there’s still a problem!
So anyway, besides these problems, I now have a working ADSL Max MLPP bonded service – however how’s the performance?
Well, upstream (and my original reason to set up this great deal was to boost this), I’m getting a stable 2Mbps (250KBps ish) – outstanding – just what I desired so I can submit big data through FTP for my clients rapidly
Downstream is a different matter though as well as a bit disappointing. I get anywhere from 3 to 6.5Mbps depending upon the time of day. I’ve evaluated the throughput of private lines in addition to the 3 line MLPP bond. Sometimes, the 3 line bond performs at the exact same speed as a single line as well as at other times, it’s somewhat higher – however never as high as I may have really hoped for. This is still work-in-progress as well as I’m continuing to speak with Enta support as well as the reseller (UKFSN) to see if we can discover out why the performance isn’t as expected, still, I’m extremely pleased with the upstream performance which was my primary reason for doing this as well as downstream isn’t precisely slow!
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Note: these figures are actual THROUGHPUT data rates as well as were determined on a regular basis by a number of techniques including the ADSL guide speed test as well as genuine world FTP transfers to a number of held web sites.
So exactly how about costs? Well, the rough breakdown is as follows:
Monthly:
3 x analogue BT line rental – £11 per line per month (not sure yet if the second as well as third are charged at £12 or not) + VAT?
3 x office Max ADSL Max lines (45Gb top cap each as well as 300Gb each off-peak) – £25 per month + VAT
Initial Outlay:
Migration of existing line – free
Conversion of house highway to Analogue – £50 (IIRC) + VAT?
New line – £99 + VAT?
PC to run router – totally free (as it was an old machine)
3 x Sangoma S518 ADSL PCI cards – £112 each (no VAT) – includes licence for the bonded router software.
128Mb USB pen drive with compose safeguard switch – £30 (ish)
Note: that although the bonded router software application is free, you requirement a licence for every ADSL PCI card you want to utilize with it. It is likewise offered from other sources for totally free however may be an older version. The software application is based on GPL software application with a high level of customisation/scripts etc.
As I was previously paying £65 + VAT per month for a 2Mbps connection as well as a fair bit for a house highway line, implementing this service hasn’t expense me a excellent offer much more per month (if you take up front costs out), particularly as I’ve gained so much much more performance wise.
I hope this has been helpful – overall, if you requirement as much upstream bandwidth as possible, I’d suggest this solution. It’s not for the faint of heart though as there are potentially numerous issues to be encountered. Hopefully, numerous of these will not happen though as ADSL Max becomes a much more robust as well as comprehended product.
Paul Gale can be contacted on – adsl at siliconpixel dot com
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Last update on 2021-10-04 / affiliate links / pictures from Amazon product marketing API