Sharedband - ADSL Bonding - any experience

Like a lot of people it seems I live out in the sticks - North Cambridgeshire, connected to an exchange which will probably never get Fibre. Its a Market 1 exchange with 435 connections.

I work from home full time which is good and up to now I have managed with my current connection but it does irk me when I know its taking me longer to finish something because of my connection - out of interest here is the stats:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 3008 kbps 448 kbps
Line Attenuation 49.5 db 30.0 db
Noise Margin 13.1 db 15.0 db

I am currently with Eclipse and they have been a good ISP but I am paying a premium for what is a 3Mb line. My plan is to go with http://www.sharedband.com/solutions/service-pricing/ and use 2 cheaper ISPs (after getting a second line installed - from what I understand the line from the pole is carrying 3 pairs so should be a matter of a second master socket?

Does anyone have any experience of using sharedband in this way - rather than going through a reseller like Eclipse which would be far more expensive. I did look at aa.net.uk but the problem is they only support a firebrick which is £900 whereas sharedband are offering 2 x DGN1000 for £98.

Either way its not cheap after looking at 2 line rentals, 2 ISPs and the sharedband charge and all I can expect at the end is 6-8Mb.

Before heading down bonded line you might want to see about getting the best from your line

http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/calc/index.php?param=RG...

Suggests you are below the expected connection speed of 3.3 Mbps to 6.5 Mbps

A good chunk of speed is being lost by the high target margin, and if the WBC ADSL2+ service is available at the exchange get Eclipse to move you to it, and your upstream speeds will probably double. Might not be available as exchange is small.

Eclipse should be able to get the target noise margin tweaked and even if this is just an ADSL based service, grab you another 1 Meg of speed for no cost.

Thanks for that I will speak to Eclipse and see how it goes.

Mark

You should be able to get nearly double the current speed, 5 Meg say, on your current set-up w/out bonding, if your ISP were to reduce your Target NM to the usual 6dB.

I have some experience of using 2 ADSL services together where I live in France. I have one service from Orange and one from SFR, as there are two pairs in the cable that runs to our house. I use 2 Draytek Vigor 120 modems (which are plain DSL2+ modems - they have no internal router) and a separate TP-Link TL-ER6020 router, which has 2 WAN inputs which are connected to the 2 modems. The router provides the ISP login data as the modems simply synchronise and provide a data connection to the router. The router has various WAN sharing parameters that you can set up to allow data to be routed via either or both connections to the Internet. You could also use a Draytek Vigor 2830 modem router with a single external Draytek modem, as the 2830 has an additional WAN connection to which you can connect the external modem. I have only had this set up for a few weeks so far. It does work, but the current problem is that Orange supports ADSL2+ and provides around 8Mb/s but SFR only seems to support ADSL2, which only gives about 2Mb/s. The advantage of a second ISP (SFR in our case) is rather marginal at present but would be more useful if I can get SFR to move the connection to ADSL2+. The only problems I have noted so far are some VOIP call connection problems and running a speed test produces some rather strange and variable results (probably to be expected). However it clearly can be done if needed. I would agree, however, that it should be possible to gain some improvement on the existing service you have before investing in all the extra hardware!

Mark,

I'm a broadband champion for the Connecting Cambridgeshire project and also live in North Cambs. If you PM me your exchange I'll see if I can find out what the plans are for your area.

Mike

Thanks Mike - PM sent.

There is a substantial difference between what you describe, which is a form of load sharing between two lines, and the line bonding that Sharedband offers.

Load sharing is relatively simple, but the algorithms built into even quite expensive routers are of mixed quality in identifying how to spread the load across the lines. Once a program or session has been allocated to a line, it remains with that line in order to avoid inconsistencies.

Sharedband treats the two (or more) lines as a single connection but with higher bandwidth. It requires compatible hardware at both ends - hence the expense - to manage this. The trouble is that nothing is going to convert multiple 512 kbps lines into a single 10 Mbps connection because the overhead of managing multiple lines increases sharply with the number of lines that are bonded.

Mark

I'm with Eclipse and have been for >10 years with an excellent service, no complaints there. However I too became increasingly unhappy about the premium pricing so a year or so ago I rang them to get a MAC. I was put through to their retention department. We then had a discussion. Finally I finished up with a 30% reduction on my monthly charge, and 3 free months. This was providing a took a 24-month contract. I did some comparisons at the time with moving to Plusnet and found that the Eclipse deal was < £15 dearer over the 2 years. So I stayed with Eclipse but with saving money.

It may well be worth you ringing Eclipse to ask for a MAC and see if they'll make you an offer.

The price charged for the kit, the activation of each line and then the bonding per line can diff. If you do it direct, it can work out much more expensive than if you do it through a partner.

One thing to note though and something sharedband advise too, make sure that the ISP you do choose does not throttle or traffic manage too heavily, or at all. Even if this only happens on one line, it can impact the whole bond making it unusable.

Matt