Bonded FTTC options and how to check availability

Hi guys I am moving out of a virgin enabled area into an area with FTTC, is anyone aware where I can check for getting bonnded FTTC to ensure I can get at least 100 meg download speeds please? It's for work purposes as I am investigating a few possible options currently.

Not many options.

Andrews and Arnold do bonding.

https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/

Edited by j0hn83 (Fri 28-Jun-19 23:37:42)

Its going to cost you a small fortune for a true bonded connection.

Is it absolutely essential to be bonded, as its much much cheaper to load-balance several connections instead of bonding.

In reply to a post by alexatkin:

Its going to cost you a small fortune for a true bonded connection.

Not necessarily true. You could get two connections from same or different ISPs, and use AAISP L2TP service on top (£10 per month) to bond them. Or as suggested before, just go with AAISP in the first place.

Whether it's worth it depends on your usage pattern. If you must have single high speed flows, e.g. an individual HTTP or FTP sessions using the full available speed, then you need to bond. If this is mixed browsing traffic then sticky load-balancing may be good enough.

Could I ask, what VDSL speed does https://dslchecker.bt.com show for the new location? And does it show G.Fast?

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Not necessarily true. You could get two connections from same or different ISPs, and use AAISP L2TP service on top (£10 per month) to bond them. Or as suggested before, just go with AAISP in the first place.

I'm not aware of this service being usable to bond connections? It's a single L2TP tunnel from a single endpoint? This isn't listed as a use case anywhere on their website and there's nothing about it in their knowledge base? In fact it explicitly lists it as an active-passive solution only.

If you've some cunning way to actually have it bond that'd be interesting but I'm not sure how you could without A&A's participation in sending packets down multiple tunnels rather than how they appear to do it with just the one. Can't even route across L2TP and their own xDSL product simultaneously, the L2TP is preferred.

You could be right. At https://support.aa.net.uk/Bonding_for_resilience it says:

"Our L2TP serivice [sic] allows backup using tunnels via any alternative internet access for the same IPs. Please let us know if this is of interest to you."

Although this is in described in the bonding category, it could just be failover, and it sounds like you have experience in this.

AAISP�s L2TP offering is a simple vpn service with major advantages over a more well known commercial vpn service such as NordVPN:
- a unique UK static IP address
- AAISPs L2TP ip is highly unlikely to be flagged up as vpn based by sites such as iPlayer or Netflix. So ideal to use from abroad.
- better vpn speeds than other providers.

On the downside it�s quite pricy compared to other providers (£10 /m), has a monthly download limit, can�t use the service on more than 1 line simultaneously and it doesn�t offer more secure vpn encryption methods such as OpenVPN - necessary if you want to escape the prying eyes of MI5/GCHQ