Not a bad idea, though i'd probably need to go out and buy one. Any recommendations for a cheap-but-good one?

Will you need wireless "N"?

If "G" is adequate then there are plenty of good brand new routers available at about the £20 mark - I personally like Speedtouch/Thomson 585 v7's but I'm sure others will have alternative suggestions particularly as you are considering Annex M (which I've never used.)

I have a standalone N base station (Airport Extreme) which i'd continue to use, so the modem/router doesnt really need wifi at all. My current one has G, which I only use if i need better range (laptop / tablet in the garden or whatever). Thanks

Probably no need to buy an expensive router then - I can run a Gigabit LAN using a Gigabit switch without any problems together with an inexpensive router. But please find out about the best choice for an Annex M connection before you buy anything...

will do, thanks dude

upload of a ~2GB virtual machine image

On ADSL lines, given that the rate of upload will only be up to ~100KB per second, it is going to take at least 20000 of those seconds.
If the upload is via a web-based form you can't guarantee it will complete if it takes longer than 15-30 mins (the session may timeout).

An FTP client that can resume an upload may do better but you have to accept this can a good chunk of your day, and you may prefer to limit the upload in the client to 80% of what is available (otherwise your downstream and latency may also be affected).
(edit) FileZilla can do this, and can talk to both FTP and SSH servers.

Even if you get a 2Mbit upload it is probably going to take longer than 3 hours.
This is where you need to consider different class of internet connection rather than bonding 2 lines.

If you were regularly exchanging virtual machine images, with only small progressive changes, something to look at is rsync which can send differential files rather than the whole thing. I believe Dropbox is based on this too.
or
with virtual machines, depending on the nature of the project, it is feasible to place the (changing) data on a separate smaller disk image from the operating system, if you only need to exchange that (and maybe a tar.gz or zip of any configuration folders (such as /etc).

Edited by prlzx (Thu 02-May-13 22:23:20)

thanks prlzx - im familiar with rsync and techniques for minimising the content in the VM - unfortunately its a massive database that takes up the room.

thanks again all