Bonding ADSL lines?

We have an exchange only ADSL line that gets around 10Mbps down/0.6 Mbps up. This line is "in scope" for FTTP but no timeframe is available on that. We'd like to be able to raise these speeds.

When we check our address (rather than our actual line) on the checkers it tells me that it's connected to a cabinet which now has FTTC available.

There's a second phone line in our house which we haven't used since we've lived here. I've asked my ISP (Zen) if there's any chance it might be connected to the cabinet, and they say there's no way to tell without connecting it, so I've decided I might as well pay the connection fee to find out. I'm fully expecting to find it's a second exchange only line though.

I asked Zen about bonding two ADSL lines together as I thought this was something that required ISP level magic to get working but they say

"you can look into bonding the two lines together we have lots of customers that buy the connections from us and bond the lines themselves so it�s nothing that we need to do it�s just not something we offer."

Can somebody point me in the direction of learning what kind of bonding they are talking about as it seems different to what I've been reading about. Thanks!

The bonding Zen are talking about is load balancing, i.e. a router at your end decides which line to send the data over.

True line bonding makes two lines behave as one, and ISP like AAISP do this using the Firebrick solution but comes with a higher price tag than load balancing.

On the availability stuff given the postcode can take a look, sometimes areas are in flux and checkers can return quirky results and we usually can tell that by looking at the other changes we have made in the last few weeks when tracking what Openreach are up to.

Before FTTC arrived I used this for a year:

http://sharedband.com/

It did the job, you don't quite get the full speed of both lines. I had 2* 3mbit lines and ended up getting about 5.5mbit.

Its not cheap, but it was the only option for me to make working at home feasible.

Thanks, that's helpful. I thought they must not mean "bonding" the way I understood it. I'd be interested if you could get (or interpolate) any more info out of the system for my postcode, is it ok to send you a private message about that?

PM is ok

Thanks, that looks interesting, I'll have a look into that. I can manage to work from home just fine, I have much the same process as when I had 14.4k modem, but back then I didn't have a family wanting to stream video and play games online all the time too!

I use line balancing - in practise it is as good as bonding if you have a number of different sessions running at the same time. It isn't as good if you have just one session that you want to maximise as it is limited to the faster of the lines.
I actually load balance an ADSL line with 4G, which for me seems to be the best compromise, as well as providing a level of redundancy should one or the other be out of action.

Another +1 for load balancing as opposed to bonding. If you dont need the combined speed of the two lines then balancing is far easier/cheaper solution. With a half decent router, you could allocate kids devices in a certain IP range and control which devices use which line so you've always got enough bandwidth to get on with your work.

Be* used to do ADSL port bonding, which works much better than any other ADSL bonding solution - I was their first paying customer on the service years ago, for a massive (at the time) 48m down and 5m up on ADSL2+.

I don't know if anyone still offers it however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.992.5

Thanks to all for the hints about load balancing and bonding. MrSaffron has given me some hope that reading between the lines our second line might actually be FTTC. I've ordered the line to be connected now and will keep my fingers crossed. Will let you know what happens!

ta!

So what hardware are we recommending these days for load-balancing? I'd be interested in shifting traffic onto 4G when my ADSL2+ is saturated

Also following with interest, again looking at mixing ADSLmax with mobile data. Have been looking at TP-LINK TL-470T+, which does a good job on QOS to balance out users on slow ADSL, can also see if use THREE, how to redirect Netflix traffic over mobile to use go binge. The issue I can't see is how to boost general use without exceeding data limit.

I can't really make a considered recommendation as I only have experience of one router - a Draytek Vigor 2860n+. That has a whole load of features that allow various load-balancing and routing configurations. Not all are easy to set up or even understand. It does allow ADSL/VDSL to be load balanced with ethernet connections (e.g. from another router) or using WiFi to tether to a hotspot (e.g. a MiFi, phone or 4G router) or using a 3G/4G dongle (they list the ones that are supported/tested).
It can disable a WAN when it reaches a monthly data limit (useful with 4G). You can force certain traffic through a particular WAN (e.g. you could use 4G for Netflix).
Another option is to use failover, where a WAN is only used when another fails or reaches a set traffic level - that can reduce the traffic on a 4G connection to just the times you need the extra bandwidth.
I'm sure there are other routers that offer the same sort of things. I would recommend getting one that can tether though - allowing your home network to share your phone connection could be useful as a fallback when your ADSL/VDSL is out of action.

Good point: using a tethered connection would be very useful. thanks!

Beware that "binge" style offers tend to be a degraded quality, for example, capped at 480p. Arguably fine on a phone screen, but disappointing on a 55-inch telly

Slightly off topic, but when speedtests and TBB Map stats occur on bonded lines, do they show an effective single line speed?

Just imagining how others using the map might pull their hair out, seeing double their speeds in their area, if it shows the bonded speed.

I too am using a Draytek (2925) to load balance an ADSL connection with a FIXED WIRELESS connection. Well it used to be for load balance, now it is primarily for fail over as we use the FIXED WIRELESS for pretty much everything but the Draytek has been reliable and offers some quite advanced functionality albeit nothing like as flexible and powerful as a Mikrotik which will let you load balance as many connections as there are ports on the router, a feature which a lot of the more advanced routers support (steep learning curve if you are not familiar or from a tech background).

In reply to a post by richi:

Beware that "binge" style offers tend to be a degraded quality, for example, capped at 480p. Arguably fine on a phone screen, but disappointing on a 55-inch telly

Not any more after recent Ofcom Rulings - both Vodafone (passes) and Three (Go Binge) will operate at full resolution

In reply to a post by camieabz:

Slightly off topic, but when speedtests and TBB Map stats occur on bonded lines, do they show an effective single line speed?

Just imagining how others using the map might pull their hair out, seeing double their speeds in their area, if it shows the bonded speed.

Generally a speedtest on a bonded service will appear from the geolocation of the data centre hosting the aggregation side... that said on a TBB test by postcode, yes it would show up as a faster speed, but with either an unknown ISP or a lesser known provider if they feature in TBB ISP listings.

That's good news. However, I bet those streams are still deprioritised, so when the cell is congested the streaming service itself will automatically switch to a stream that's lower bitrate, lower resolution.

They are rare so that asking ALL users are you using a bonded connection would probably get a higher error rate than positive correct answers.

Anyone plotting UK speed tests using geolocation from IP address is doing it wrong

I have just run a TBB speed test on my ADSL/4G load balanced line. The single thread speed is 11Mbps download (over ADSL) and the multi-thread is 36.8Mbps bursting to 40.4Mbps (mainly 4G). The upload is 11Mbps bursting to 13.6Mbps. Latency is 75ms, but can be as low as 20ms if it is measured over ADSL rather than 4G.
Results vary according to time of day much more than a fixed line would - I can get a max of anything between 16Mpbs and 44Mbps down, and between 1.8Mbps and 28Mbps up. So it is much better than just the ADSL, but not ideal. I would move to another solution if there was one.

Having just checked my postcode, I can see that tests indicate an upload of 3.6Mbps. That will be my load-balanced line as the only option in my postcode is ADSL Max/ADSL2+ - and that can't do 3.6Mbps.

Good to know. It might explain the odd result in more rural areas.