Using two Fibre connections at home advice please.

Hi all,
I'm new to the forum

I would really appreciate it if anyone could help me with some advice.

I currently have a 30Mb Fibre connection with Sky. Later this month I am having a second 30Mb fibre connection installed by BT on their new "Dedicated Connection" service.

My original plan was to allow the Sky fibre to continue serving all the many devices around the house such as TV's, consoles, tablets, phones etc and to dedicate the new BT fibre line to simply my PC in my office.

However I got to thinking if it would be better to somehow combine the two connections ? Maybe with something like a Draytek Vigor 2862 ?

But i'm not sure if this is possible or even if it would give me a speed boost - The way I understand it is that because the two lines are not bonded at the ISP end I wouldn't get 60Mb on one machine if needed.

Any advice would be much appreciated

Could you tell us more about the new BT "Dedicated Connection" service, I have never heard of it.

It's just a 2nd line with broadband and BT Halo benefits.

Article from ISPreview

So it's not "new" (BT think it is!) it's very expensive and exactly what is Dedicated about it? You may as well get the cheapest FTTC service you can find for a second connection. It must be some pointless marketing gimmick devised by BT.

My understanding of it was that this was the only product you could buy to have a second physical line installed and still be able to keep your existing line (AND without paying Openreach for the installation of a new piece of copper from the pole) ?

Edited by deleted (Sun 14-Jun-20 08:31:17)

That's just marketing fluff by BT. Nothing stopping you taking a second "dedicated" FTTC line by TalkTalk (for example) and getting free installation on that as well.

I didn't realise that - I thought they all charged installation for a line (as they would be charged by OpenReach) ?

I've just looked into BT Business Broadband as an alternative (I have a Ltd Company and work from home). Even with the £125 installation cost, a comparable package on Bt Business works out at £1071 over 24 months whereas the "Dedicated Connection" package works out as £1439 over 24 months!

Have a look at TalkTalk Business. They offer free line installation:

https://www.talktalk.co.uk/business/product/fibre

Yes, its a long 24 month contract but they will let you leave penalty free if they can't resolve any issue within 28 days, as they've signed up to Ofcom's Business Broadband Code of Practice. Their phone support is pretty good, far superior to their residential offering.

Thanks I will check that out now. What do you think about Vodafone Business ? 22.50 per month with no line installation costs. (Superfast 2)

But there is something confusing about their speed checker - I know on my Sky line I get about 30-36Mb but their speedchecker says this (screenie) : https://www.screencast.com/t/3pKGxxzdOd8v

IE: Can Vodafone magically somehow give me faster speeds than Sky can using the same copper route to the pole and cab ?

Edited by deleted (Sun 14-Jun-20 09:14:24)

And TalkTalk Business gives the following :

https://www.screencast.com/t/lQc772Y8nc

So go for the BT Business package - the 4G dongle is supplied at day 1.

Also, having a "Business Package" makes it a lot easier to put the cost through your accounts and recover VAT. In my case the Business Broadband was delivered over a residential line and the accountant advised not to charge the line rental as a business expense even though it was essential for a business service. Moved the line to Business which became cheaper and also allow recovery of VAT and the rental as an expense. There are no chargeable outgoing personal calls made on te line.

Yes, you can use a Draytek router to load balance between connections. It works well and will provide a performance boost under most conditions. You won't see any improvement on single file downloads because it's not a bonded connection but it can make web browsing more snappy.

The whole home wifi and 4g backup maybe worth it for some.
As always though buyer beware, do your research before committing.

In reply to a post by caffn8me:

Yes, you can use a Draytek router to load balance between connections. It works well and will provide a performance boost under most conditions. You won't see any improvement on single file downloads because it's not a bonded connection but it can make web browsing more snappy.

I'm not sure which model to go for and would appreciate some advice please ?

As far as I can tell the 2862 has 1 VDSL WAN interface and 1 Ethernet WAN interface - So I will have two Master sockets I guess (One Sky and One BT or Other) - How do I physically connect the 2 WAN interfaces ?

Edited by deleted (Sun 14-Jun-20 12:43:15)

They are basing their figures off what Openreach supply as estimates, your actual sync will trump those figures, so speeds should not be faster/slower pending variations in hardware and things like G.INP turning off/on

Connect one service direct to the VDSL line. the second will need a dedicated modem and the output from the modem is then connected to the Ethernet WAN

In reply to a post by MHC:

Connect one service direct to the VDSL line. the second will need a dedicated modem and the output from the modem is then connected to the Ethernet WAN

It doesn't necessarily need a dedicated modem. It can also use the supplied router but there will be double NAT in operation. I have yet to experience any problems with this so far at a number of sites where the ISP router can't be replaced and a dedicated firewall is used LAN side.

I'm beginning to think it might be simpler to just have the new connection straight into my office and dedicate it to my work PC's and let the existing Sky BB handle all the family stuff lol.

I did look at the Vodafone Gigacube but apparently it has issues with online gaming.

Has anyone any experince of using the Speedify service with two ISP's connected to my main rig with 1 via WiFi and one via Ethernet ?

As if by magic, I've been contacted today and asked to set up a site to use multiple external ISP services for the same internal network. At the moment it has just one BT FTTC connection. I don't yet have address details so have no idea which other providers are available but it may well be that I'll use a Draytek 2800 series router for this. I'll let you know when I get a bit more information.

Draytek 2800 series

Good and reliable kit

Yes, I'd agree with that. I've used Draytek 2700 and 2800 routers for a few years. They've been rock steady and are also very configurable.

The only reason I'm not using one on my latest project (a new project today) is because the throughput is only 400Mbps and the client has gigabit FTTP but needs ADSL failover because the FTTP is so unreliable (SFR in France).

In reply to a post by caffn8me:

As if by magic, I've been contacted today and asked to set up a site to use multiple external ISP services for the same internal network. At the moment it has just one BT FTTC connection. I don't yet have address details so have no idea which other providers are available but it may well be that I'll use a Draytek 2800 series router for this. I'll let you know when I get a bit more information.

The addendum to this is that the London site I was asked to provide this at is very unlikely to need failover. I've now got the address and it has G.Fast. I think the problems are all wi-fi related but will confirm when I get a chance to visit. Meanwhile, the same client arrived in France yesterday just as their new FTTP connection fell over for thirteen hours. This is going to need ADSL fallback.

Have you looked at one of DrayTek's higher end products?
I believe the top of the range supports 10Gb.

I personally use a custom built PC with PFSense for my VM 500Mb connection.

Thanks
Dan

The higher end Drayteks lose the advantage of having a built-in DSL modem. I used to run two sites with Draytek 2860 routers on VDSL with 4G dongle backup and it worked extremely well. The older Draytek 2850 actually has two separate internal modems - one ADSL and one VDSL and both could be connected to different lines operating in parallel or failover mode. That's very neat.

In this case I'll almost certainly be using a WatchGuard firewall with SD-WAN.

There are a number of benefits WatchGuards have for the sort of setups I run including being able to establish VPN endpoints with a virtual tunnel interface. I'm pretty sure that's not something Draytek supports on any of their products. I certainly can't find a way to do it on the 2850 I'm about to swap out. I can do it on Ubiquiti very easily and Cisco supports it too.

One really major downside I've found with Draytek is that there's no way to create or edit a configuration offline, only connected to a live device.

I had one situation where a very complicated Draytek running configuration was corrupted which caused certain services to fail in a reproducible way. Doing a factory reset and uploading the backup configuration reintroduced the bugs because the downloaded configuration file was corrupted too. It's a propietary binary format and there's no way to fix it now that Draytools doesn't work.

Draytek's support could only suggest a factory reset and start building the configuration from scratch on the live device.

That's not easy remotely.