Fidonet comments? Looking for a bonded FTTC service

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone here knows what FidoNet is like?

Reason I ask is that I'm looking for a 'not too expensive' option for when I move house soon, as I may need two lines to increase the speed of FTTC there. So far FidoNet's pricing seems the best I've seen and I've read they also support bonding. I've checked AAISP's options and they seem rather pricey (but given AAISP's quality standards I'd expect that), I also checked Fluidata's website but not sure what they would charge roughly.

On the other hand, I've also read load balancing is a possible alternative but I'm not sure if that would have an impact on my need for a block of 8 IP's for my home server and a few other devices. I've got a Draytek Vigor 2860 which is supposed to do load balancing from what I can see, so if I end up going down that route instead then at least I have the hardware capable of doing that.

Thanks in advance.

america only ?

http://www.z1.fidonet.org/

http://www.fidonet.org/

https://www.fido.net/telecoms/broadband/

Ah - The price rather seem so expensive!

Yeah, it's the cheapest one I've seen so far though, still expensive however . I might be forced to just get two separate FTTC services and load balance them, and finally hope that it doesn't effect anything in regards to my home server and a few other devices using a block of public static IP addresses. I'm currently with Zen, but as far as I know they don't support MLPPP so I can't even do that, which brings me back to square one with load balancing and hoping it works on the Draytek.

You could drop Uno a line to get a quote.
They advertise line bonding.

Presumably upload is important to you if you are running a server? Load balancing won't help with that.

Thanks! Uno initially caught my eye a while ago but I didn't realise they did bonded FTTC. I've sent them a query, hopefully they can offer a good deal. I'm expecting the price to be a little more than what two separate FTTC services would cost, but not majorly higher like FidoNet or AAISP so far show.

Upload is important to me yes, so ideally a bonded solution would be preferable. Download is just as important too, but not in comparison to upload.

Let us know what they come back with.
You don't see much info on bonding on here.

I'm guessing the cost of the hardware required at your end may be high...

Matt said that while they've never tested FTTC bonding, it should work identical to ADSL2+ bonding (they can't test FTTC bonding as their office in Sheffield doesn't have FTTC capability). If anything there may be a few minor tweaks they need to do in order for it to work, which can be ironed out throughout the setup.

The bonding has a maximum aggregate of 80-90Mb currently with the higher end routers.

Although I don't have a line yet, we went purely by the address of where I believe I'll be moving to soon.

His estimate is as follows:
£8 per month per line for the bonding service
£22 per line setup
£59.99 per router per line, which would then connect in to the BT modem and start the PPPoE session

I imagine there's also the FTTC service package costs to add on top of that. Sounds pretty fair to me .

Edited by Ixel (Fri 11-Sep-15 23:28:44)

Yep. Thanks for that.
That's a relatively small incremental cost. Looks like they have some cheaper line rental products on the way also.

I assume the allowances from each line are combined so you may be able to step down a product level?