Need bandwidth what can I do?

I'm in a bit of a dilemma.

Until recently, at work, we had two lines which were bonded using MLPPP, this has worked flawlessly for over a year, come to the beginning of this week when one line wouldn't connect due to the wrong endpoint discriminator, after many tests and time on both my, and my ISP's (Entanet) part we came to the conclusion that one line had switched to another node.

Enta have attempted to rectify this by forcing both lines on to the same LNS, whilst this does work and enabled the lines to bond, the upload speed takes a massive hit for no discernible reason. Both line sync at around 3.5mbit and 832kbps upload, when the lines are tested in isolation (before the LNS is forced) they test as you would expect, as soon as Entanet forces the LNS the upload speed crumbles to just 190kbps, this is not a line fault or equipment fault as I've spent all morning with Enta swapping things around, trying different logins and what not. The issue is directly related to forcing the lines connect to a specific LNS, what is strange however that is even the line that's on the correct LNS to start with also suffers the upload speed hit.

Thanks for reading this far, and so we continue...

Level 2 support at Enta have only encountered this 3 times before, they've spoken with BTW but they refuse to rectify the node issue because it would involve disconnecting a large number of customers (yet when they need to move people they just do it?), initial thoughts are the line has been moved due to capacity issues.

This leaves me with a couple of solution, neither of which are straight forward. One of our lines has a redcare service on it and one is just a normal phoneline. The solution would be to provide a new line, the new line will terminate at one of the two locations that our existing ones do, whichever line is the 'odd one out' would be terminated, but by doing this we risk that the 'odd one out' is going to be the redcare line which entails more expense getting the redcare moved over and a visit from the alarm engineer.

As a side note the lines were testing with a PSTN fault of 'discon network' intermittently but this wasn't affecting my phones or line sync, I reported it to BT and the fault is now cleared according to their faults website.

The second option is to keep the lines as they are but move to a load balanced solution, the only problem with this is we will not be able to utilise the full bandwidth without multi-threading our transfers, it also makes QoS a little trickier as we have VoIP phones and we need to reserve a portion of bandwidth so that they don't begin to 'break up' under heavy network loads.

We do perform a lot of single threaded transfers and we do ideally need the MLPPP solution to work as it once did, there are no other services available to us and there's no date for FTTC (which I might add would solve everything as the cab is only down the road).

Sorry for such a massive post but there's a lot that's gone on that can't simply be condensed into two or three sentences.

Thanks for any suggestions you might have.

Edited by deleted (Thu 14-Jun-12 14:26:30)

Would moving the VoIP onto their own dedicated ADSL line help?

Giving you the full 832 Kbps from a single line for the uploads?

We have a similar set up here but with Timico.

Our solution though was to talk to the other companies sharing this rural office park. We discovered that getting fibre to the park was free as the ducting was already in place. With four of us sharing the costs we should all be able to get 10Mb/s symmetrical for around £300pcm. Maybe less since one of the quotes is particularly low. The landlord pays for the install (only a couple of grand anyway) and we rent bandwidth off him.

It's still a work in progress but my advice is not to assume that fibre is impossible. It might not even be that expensive. If we wanted 40Mb/s symmetrical all to ourselves it's still only just over a grand a month and the install costs are pretty small as well.

Edited by Andrue (Thu 14-Jun-12 15:47:11)

We're only a SOHO we can't afford fibre, especially as we are very rural (I should have maybe mentioned that).

Not sure if Sharedband would be a good alternative?

We're testing in our office on our longish lines (not our primary connectivity) and it appears to be very robust and stable - even for VoIP.

Matt

Does it rely on MLPPP?

No.

It creates a VRRP link between 2-4 routers on the client end which has a floating gateway in case a single router dies.

It then creates a bonded link to an aggregation server at the remote end. (If from Sharedband directly, within their transit network).

We're getting a trial aggregation server setup to test the performance within network, but IP ranges can be assigned and multiple "business-grade" ISPs can be mixed to provide better resilience.

The server checks the lines every 6 hours and balances the load accordingly.

Latency only appears to increase by 2-3ms over the bond.

Matt

Any overheads? As its presumably a tunnel...

Some.. but not much.

I'll try and connect a single laptop to it and run some comparative tests... either way, performance was very good.

Matt

Edited by uno (Thu 14-Jun-12 16:44:43)

In reply to a post by PiKe:

We're only a SOHO we can't afford fibre, especially as we are very rural (I should have maybe mentioned that).

Fair enough but unless you've actually done the research you might not realise how cheap it is. Our office park is in a village which is a mile from the nearest town. Not exactly the back of beyond but it is rural - we have a pig farm on one side and several crop fields on the other. In our case the ducting had been repaired a while back so when we talked to various providers they all said there'd be no cost for the actual blowing of the fibre. It seems BT just write it off as part of the ongoing costs of the local loop. A 100Mb/s bearer initially run at 10Mb/s came out at £6k install and £300pcm. Our current bonded solution is costing us £250pcm and we only get 4 down and 1.5 up - and frequent disconnections.

One of the quotes that I haven't seen it is apparently 'substantially lower' and I suspect that means around £4k. That's prolly because it doesn't have any connections to T1 providers so slightly higher latency and perhaps fewer points of failure.

Anyway it certainly isn't cheap but a dedicated fibre link needed be horribly expensive either