FTTC load balancing and/or line bonding a possibility?

I remember back in the adsl days people use to talk about line bonding with certain isp's helping. Others talked about load balancing of 2 lines.

Is there any device that can load balance 2 fttc lines to increase speeds or do we think this technology will be skipped with fttc ?

I think Ignitionnet was using a TP Link TL-ER6020 on here to load balance 2 FTTC connections, quite successfully.

There may be people who need more bandwidth than that available on a single FTTC connection, but can't justify the cost of a business fibre (Openreach EAD, or similar) so require something.

There are some fundamental problems if you have two (or more) connections and use a load balancing router:

1. Whilst you can share outbound traffic across the connections you have no idea if an outgoing connection will return 1k (e.g. a small web page) or 2G (e.g. a video stream), so inbound traffic is likely to be unequal - the upshot is that two connecctions won't double your bandwidth.

2. Traffic from an individual client will appear to come from the public IP address of either connection, this breaks some HTTPS websites, VPNs, VOIP - routers can attempt to fix this by making the client NAT connections 'sticky' (any particular client get associated with one connection for a period of time), or by passing all HTTPS, VPN and VOIP traffic down one connection but as more traffic is becoming encrypted, or if you have few clients, this may leave the other connection under utilised.

You mention line bonding, this addresses the above issues by bonding routers at the premises and the ISP - the FTTC connections are just a tunnel for packets between these routers so each end can balance traffic destined for its partner, and when the traffic emerges at the ISP it has an unchanging public address.

I'm not aware of any ISPs who currently offer this, however there is an alternative where you use standard FTTC connections, but in this case your router establishes VPN tunnels with a device at a company which provides a bonding service, the downside of this is that latency will go up and you may have transfer caps from both the ISP and the bonding service company.

Traffic could take this path:
PC -- router -- ISP1 -- internet -- bonding_company -- router -- bonding_company -- internet -- some_web_site
or this one:
PC -- router -- ISP2 -- internet -- bonding_company -- router -- bonding_company -- internet -- some_web_site

the PC and web site see nothing of the ISP -- internet -- bonding_company addresses as the traffic is encapsulated by VPNs between the routers.

I recently got TV from BT and in the process got Infinity 2. I already had a Plusnet FTTC line.

So as not to waste the spare bandwidth of the BT line I load balance both connections using a Netgear SRX5308 (perhaps a bit of overkill). It also means that for some of my applications my download speeds have gone up from 6MB/s to 10MB/s (limited by my 100Mb LAN)

Of course applications which don't support multiple streams are still limited to the slowest FTTC connection. And the sync of the existing FTTC line dropped 5Mb/s

Tim

I have a bonded connection using two lines from A&A ISP.
The two standard routers feed into a FireBrick 2700.
This virtually doubled my download speed.
The FireBrick is expensive, but worth the investment.
All the info is on the A&A website.

There are two ways to aggregate subscriber lines to increase broadband speeds. (i) at the very lowest level of the DSL protocol. That requires specialist support in both the DSLAM and CPE modems. Consequently, it can only be done with the assistance of the telco, and BT does not support it. (ii) the second way is with the multi-link point-to-point protocol (MLPPP). Way back in 1999, MLPPP support was incorporated into the generic ppp kernel driver for Linux. So it's a solution that doesn't require anything out of the ordinary.

At its simplest, all that's needed is (i) an ISP supporting MLPPP over VDSL2, such as A&A, Enta, Evolving Networks, Managed Comms, etc.; (ii) multiple CPE - just the bog-standard Openreach modems should be fine; (iii) a Linux box with multiple gigabit ethernet ports, configured as a gbit switch, and upon which the mlppp bundle is established with pppd.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

I think Ignitionnet was using a TP Link TL-ER6020 on here to load balance 2 FTTC connections, quite successfully.

Close, it was a TL-ER5120.

http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/cat-4910_...

No VPN functionality but higher throughput. Before crosstalk ate bandwidth could hit >140Mb/s.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4271946429

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Those were from a Plusnet FTTC and VM cable connection balanced on a Linksys LRT224

I have the TP-Link ER5120 and I have to say it works well and copes perfectly with 2 x 80/20 FTTC lines (Both With Openreach Modems)

1 thing to remember is that it is a Load Balancing firewall not a Bonding unit.
Anything that supports multiple IP's such as Steam will make the most of the connections and use as much bandwidth as possible.

It's a pretty easy unit to set up and there are only a few options to play with (the important ones)

I get this speed with no problem, I believe this is just about the max speed I have seen from the 2 lines.
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4272322139

The interface allows up to 4 WAN inputs.

Not sure if Plusnet allow this?