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!