Bonded FTTC lines

Does anyone on these forums have 2 or more FTTC lines bonded together to provide faster speeds?

I'm in the search for faster than 80/20 due to my wife doing a lot of working from home with data heavy video calls and presentation sharing, and my daughter constantly watching streaming services when at home, leaves little available for my gaming and stuff.

My current ISP offers a bonded product, which we are discussing pricing for etc at the moment, but just curious if anyone can give some real world experience on the setup.

Thanks in advance.

Do you really need to bond the second line to the first? If you're getting a second line anyway, why not just keep it separate, one 80/20 for you on a separate network with separate router, the previous line for your wife and daughter. Probably be cheaper and easier, rather than having the faff of setting up the bonding at ISP, and home level with new equipment. Just a thought, I have no idea of the costings of both scenarios.

As above, it sounds like you are using multiple sessions, so there's no need for bonding. Add a second line from a different ISP to give a little bit of resilience, and then just load balance on a router or use policy routing to send different services over different links.

Edited by jpm (Wed 21-Oct-20 16:33:03)

In reply to a post by jpm:

As above, it sounds like you are using multiple sessions, so there's no need for bonding. Add a second line from a different ISP to give a little bit of resilience, and then just load balance on a router or use policy routing to send different services over different links.

Well that's way above what I have knowledge of doing.

The ISP I have at the moment would preconfigure the kit 2 x Vigor 130 and a Draytek load balancing box to use the 2 lines as 1 and I just plug my existing router in to and have download speeds of 130 to 140Mbps and upload of 30-35Mbps.

I'm looking for faster speeds than the maximum FTTC can provide and with no sight of a FTTP or other alternative, I'm having to go down the bonded FTTC route.

I moved 2 years ago from a Virgin Media 350 connection to BT copper rubbish in all honesty, and I don't like waiting 3 hours for games to update etc.

Edited by Bryer (Wed 21-Oct-20 18:35:40)

AAISP can do it but it can cause out of order packets which causes problems for some stuff (I've found games mostly)

If you wanted a roll you own solution then there's openmptcprouter, you will need to host the server end somewhere though, I found because it proxies some traffic and not others you do get some oddities if you try and pass IPv6 over it and I had latency spikes.

At the moment I'm using SpeedFusion but that doesn't do IPv6 and the hardware for the client end isn't cheap, it also needs somewhere with enough bandwidth to do the bonding.

In reply to a post by flilot:

Do you really need to bond the second line to the first? If you're getting a second line anyway, why not just keep it separate, one 80/20 for you on a separate network with separate router, the previous line for your wife and daughter. Probably be cheaper and easier, rather than having the faff of setting up the bonding at ISP, and home level with new equipment. Just a thought, I have no idea of the costings of both scenarios.

A good question and well worth asking I think.

Bonding is the standard answer to the "I need more bandwidth than one line can provide" but you will still be sharing the bonded connection and that might not the best solution.

By having two separate lines and networks you can give your wife a dedicated connection while you and the rest of the family use another.

With two lines, two routers and two WiFi networks your wife can use one and the rest of the family the other. Although you'll probably want your wife's system to have a wired ethernet link.

In reply to a post by Bryer:

The ISP I have at the moment would preconfigure the kit 2 x Vigor 130 and a Draytek load balancing box to use the 2 lines as 1 and I just plug my existing router in to and have download speeds of 130 to 140Mbps and upload of 30-35Mbps.

What ISP is this?
That sounds more like load balancing than bonding.

You can do load balancing on your own with 2 separate lines from 2 different ISP's.

There are 3 common balancing/bonding options and many confuse them with each other.

1. IP bonding, requires the ISP to terminate both lines together at their end.

2. VDSL bonding, is done between the DSLAM and your modem.
OpenReach don't offer this at all.
Pretty common in some European countries.

3. Load balancing. Done entirely at the end users end.

I know of Draytek routers that do 2 and 3, but not aware of any that do IP bonding.

Edited by j0hn83 (Thu 22-Oct-20 13:20:21)

Thanks for all the input, think I'll just go with two seperate lines with the gaming setup hardwired with ethernet.

I run two connections because I desire speed but I also require reliability.

I have a Three 4G connection giving ~100-120mb down and around 30mb up. Slow ping.
I have a Plusnet connection of 35mb down and 10mb up.

Both connections are put into a Unifi Edge Router and load balanced before hitting my network.

Using rules I have set up that my dedicated IP phone ONLY uses plusnet if it is available and has the highest score for traffic so anything else on the network can't the phones bandwidth.

I have other rules in place during the day that dedicates the plusnet connection to my work laptop during the day. Once the evening kicks in or it's the weekend the network gets shared amongst all devices.

During the night I can max out the connections with ~150mb download speeds on speed test and 35-40mb upload.

I personally wouldn't bond lines as it is a single point of failure and you might find that the kids will steal the bandwidth from the work calls.

I use speedify which runs on a pc to bond more than one FTTC line..it seems to do what it says on the tin.

Get your wife's firm she works for to pay for the second line and running costs.

In reply to a post by APTMAN:

Get your wife's firm she works for to pay for the second line and running costs.

Made me chuckle, if they are anything like the company I work for they will say we are lucky to have jobs - jog on.

Mine would just say if you don't have the technical requirement to work from home then go into the office - unless there is a reasonable adjustments requirement in which case the line may be provided under the corporate contract but wouldn't pay expenses if someone is using their own line.

Bonding FTTC available here: https://www.cerberusnetworks.co.uk/connectivity-broa...

https://www.orbital.net/products/connectivity/bonded...

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Bonding FTTC available here: https://www.cerberusnetworks.co.uk/connectivity-broa...

https://www.orbital.net/products/connectivity/bonded...

Max, read the post. My current ISP offer this, don't need you spamming with other ISP's that don't cover my area. Thanks.

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

I personally wouldn't bond lines as it is a single point of failure

The bonding itself isn't a single point of failure: if it's PPPoE Multilink it will be able to detect which links are up and down and use one or both. However the router is a SPOF - as would be the case for dual-WAN load-balancing as well.

Having two independent lines, with their own routers, sounds like a good option here.

The only reason to bond would be if you want 160Mbps peak download performance when the home line is unused. But that works both ways: if the home users are using the full 160M then that will impact your use just as it does today. At least, not without complex QoS configuration anyway.

In reply to a post by Bryer:

don't need you spamming with other ISP's that don't cover my area. Thanks.

They both make use of BT Wholesale and are available nationwide.
It may not be helpful to you but might help others who search the forum for bonding solutions later on.

He only made a suggestion/recommendation, it's hardly spamming.

You weren't so dismissive to another poster above who pointed out AAISP do bonding.

In reply to a post by Bryer:

Max, read the post. My current ISP offer this, don't need you spamming with other ISP's that don't cover my area. Thanks.

That's not spamming with other ISPs as it available nationwide in UK. I only try to help.

Thanks to everyone for their recommendations etc.

My current ISP does offer something that is quite new to the consumer market for bonding, but the equipment to do it is quite pricey, which isn't cost effective in the 12 month contract period.

So I'm going to go with the 2 lines / 2 network setup, which will work out better while we wait to see what happens with Openreach and the other FTTP providers in this area.

Edited by Bryer (Mon 26-Oct-20 00:41:00)