VDSL2 Bonding, worth it?

Hey guys,

Currently on FTTC, with no sight of FTTP coming in the next 5 years. I'm looking to increase the bandwidth to my house as we are a very data heavy household.

Currently getting 70meg, and looking to increase it, FTTPoD is too pricey. My current provider is offering 2 or 4 x bonded FTTC connections.

I'm thinking that we get 2 bonded together for a speed of around roughly 140mb, with a 32 upload. Is it worth doing if there is no sign of FTTP?

Thoughts on it would be appreciated.

Thanks.

I tried bonding my two AAISP FTTC lines, it didn�t work as well as I�d hoped.

The two lines were around 25 down, one was 6 up, the other 3. With them bonded I could often see speed tests over over 40. The problem was in practice the actual usable bandwidth was a fair bit lower than that.

The problem was out of order packets. That causes lots of retries and hurts bandwidth.

In the end I gave up and moved to Three 4G, I am lucky enough to be 1km from a quiet mast, I get 70/30 pretty much all day every day.

I currently have AAISP's FTTC bonded over two lines, both with slightly different downstream and upstream sync rates, and I can't say I've had issues. Obviously the more lines you bond then the less you'll gain each time. No more than three is the general recommendation I believe, for the maximum possible gain. I also use a FireBrick FB2900 fully loaded, which supports bonding. It's also handy if one of the lines develops a fault or loses connection temporarily, as it minimises disruption to your overall internet connection.

I'll be switching to FTTPoD hopefully next week if there's no issues with the installation, so I won't need this service any longer, especially with the prospect of a local business looking to deploy FTTP to most of the city I live in (altnet provider) in the near future!

For the additional costs of a bonded connection, have you requested a FTTPoD estimate? Mine came in at £5,500 recently and with the estimates generally coming in at 40 to 50% more than the surveyed quotations it's tempting, particularly if you can get others on your pole to contribute and place a joint order. If I wasn't planning on moving house in the not so distant future I would definitely be making an effort to order.

The estimates are free, why not have a look?

In reply to a post by fatandpale:

For the additional costs of a bonded connection, have you requested a FTTPoD estimate? Mine came in at £5,500 recently and with the estimates generally coming in at 40 to 50% more than the surveyed quotations it's tempting, particularly if you can get others on your pole to contribute and place a joint order. If I wasn't planning on moving house in the not so distant future I would definitely be making an effort to order.

The estimates are free, why not have a look?

FTTPoD quote came in at £15k but Openreach said no to actually processing the order.

Edited by Bryer (Fri 05-Apr-19 09:29:09)

In reply to a post by Bryer:

Tattoos quote came in at £15k but Openreach said no to actually processing the order.

Why? I've seen two other cases like that, but both times it was because native FTTP was in the process of being installed anyway.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by Bryer:

Tattoos quote came in at £15k but Openreach said no to actually processing the order.

Why? I've seen two other cases like that, but both times it was because native FTTP was in the process of being installed anyway.

Stop sell order placed on my exchange for FTTPoD according to Cerburus, hence why it did not progress. My road is mainly made up of elderly couples and a few young families, which by the time they start needing bandwidth, the FTTP option will be installed.

Guess I'll just have another line put in for gaming, and one for all other purposes.

Cheers guys.

Have you thought about a Draytek with its session based load balancing.
Im using 2 connections with a Draytek 3220 albeit they are mobile, but it does a splendid job at combining the two, unlike some other load balancing solutions it doesnt use sticky sessions, it will just send them wherever. Eg Netflix will open multiple sessions for a single stream, but they could all be to the same IP address, the draytek wont care it will (and does) use both wans, where as other devices will class the IP as sticky and just use the wan that the first session is on.
Anything that uses multiple sessions which is most stuff on the internet these days will make use of both connections.

If you're going to bond them and expect it work well either lower your expectations or be prepared to spend money on decent hardware.

you can easily bond a few connections and get good results with a PepLink, you could even throw in a Three Unlimited 4G to the mix to add some more, but the routers are quite pricey

I agree, two routers especially sited in different areas of the house, and/or using different Wifi bands. If you are 'greedy' you could even save one for yourself and one for the rest! This won't give anybody faster speeds than today on their own but will help prevent slow speeds when several are trying to stream.

Agreed, I used pfSense session based load balancing before I tried full on bonding.

In my case I went on to try bonding as a single 25mbps connection was sometimes just not enough. Two 70mbps balanced lines should be good enough for just about anything.

I also have AAISP bonded VDSL - both slightly different syncs. My hallway looks like a server room as a result (I actually have a nice little white mesh drawer cabinet I got from Ikea which is perfect).

I have the two modems/routers and then the firebrick to bond them and then a Google WiFi connected to them for WiFi.

It makes my slow connection usable and if it wasn�t for that I wouldn�t be able to run all my Nest cameras and stream etc on a single line connection. Not enough bandwidth either direction (around 17MB).

I placed an order for FTTPoD and was told native FTTP will be installed by June so they won�t process my order; which I have been told on here is a good thing!

But bonding works great - I would even consider another line if it wasn�t for the FTTP - The only issue is the cost which is more than you would pay normally. 200GB a month for £90 - which is only doable because they started rolling over data not used from when I was on a more expensive tier.

Have a chat to these guys: https://evolving.net.uk/

While I've not used them, and I have no idea of pricing etc, they do apparently manage all the lines from probably different providers and bond them all together using some proprietary tech running on commodity hardware. There's an old review here, from a dubious review site: https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/review-ADSL...

I took the plunge and decided to get an extra line installed into my home last year.

My first line is with Plusnet and my second line is with Vodafone.

I use two HG612 modems and my router runs OpenWRT, one of the LAN ports is configured into a seperate WAN2 VLAN, I then use the MWAN3 package on OpenWRT that handles the dual WAN load balancing.

It works very well for me, and I am very glad that I did this, it has been well worth it and I would probably not be without it, for me the single point of failure is now at the cabinet, but not much can be done about that.

I configured MWAN3 to balance all HTTP/HTTPS connections, with the exception of my banking sites as that may potentially cause some issues with connections coming from multiple IP's.

I do a lot of downloading with Usenet, so my providers allow connection from multiple IP's and any downloading I do in the browser, I either use DownThemAll in Firefox or ensure parallel downloading is enabled in Google Chrome, this then aggregates both connections.

Hope that is of some use!