ADSL Bonding... About to move house to a 1Mbit area...

Hi,
I'm about to move house next month to a area that is just on the cusp of being classed as a rural area. However, It's about 2km away from an exchange that has fibre at the cabnet, however, fibre isn't available in the property. (One street down it is available?? Go figure? No sure what that means).

Anyway, I asked a friend who coincidentally lives in the next property to the house to run a speed test.

This is the results: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3083705237

This really alarms me. I'm using to having at least a stable 10mbit so I'm looking at my options. I think that I will look towards residential line bonding for ADSL but the prices are exhorbitantly higher than I would expect. I'd happily pay for the additional lines and additional broadband, but it appears as they the companies I've checked add an additionall 300% markup.


Can you recommend any reasonable providers? Ideally, I'd like to keep the cost to aroun £80 at the most per month for everything.

What are my options available to me?

Pity you can't get his line stats, or a peek inside his master socket.

Who's his ISP?

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 12-Nov-13 00:42:49)

BT?

Could be a bad line, poor cabling in the house or just a long line.

What does the wholesale address checker say if you look up the property?

Yep BT.

I think I will have to wait to move in before I do any actual diagnostics.

For the general postcode, the wholesale checker says:

WBC ADSL 2+ Up to 2.5 -- 1 to 4 Available
ADSL Max Up to 2 -- 1 to 3.5 Available
WBC Fixed Rate 1 -- -- Available
Fixed Rate 1 -- -- Available

However, also, if I check more accurately for the address it says:

BT BROADBAND AVAILABILITY CHECKER
Address XXXXXXXX, MAIDENCOMBE, TORQUAY, TQ1 XXXX on Exchange ST MARYCHURCH is served by Cabinet 30

Does the served by cabinet 30 mean that it supports fibre? Because that cabinet I believe has been fibre enabled.

The served by just means that is the cab you connect to. The checker suggests that cab does not have fibre. Speeds not looking great there but you may with a following wind get towards the top end.

I've been researching and I think this looks like a good option:

Buy 3 bonded lines: http://www.sharedband.com/solutions/service-pricing/
Will obviously need 3x ADSL+phone lines too. But should be able to do it maybe for about £80-90 a month. That should at least give 3-5Mbit.

I was just typing a reply but you beat me to it. I'll leave the sharedband bit in anyway...

You could look at Shareband which would work out at an additional £24 a month for two lines and 250GB usage. You would also have to buy a couple of their routers (£117.60 for the cheapest)
They recommend �high quality� broadband. No traffic management.
I believe this is the technology that Eclipse use for their bonding.

I have also seen that Xilo offer bonding but not sure what they charge for this service.
Taking them as an example using 21CN based connections maybe:

SOHO 100GB x2 £35.98
Line rental x2 £22.44 (Zen as they seem popular at the moment)

This leaves £21.58 to fit into your budget. Maybe drop then a question to see what they charge.

The cabinet is listed ALWAYS

If WBC FTTC is missing then the cabinet is not normally FTTC enabled. Time to look for properties closer to the cabinet and see if they have FTTC listed. For those with very long cabinet to premises distances the FTTC option is sometimes missing.

Most likely just a case that this cabinet was not enabled when others on the exchange were not enabled.

Also you say 2 km from the exchange building, the estimates suggest more like 5 to 6km. Or did you mean 2km from the green street cabinet.

My mistake on 2km. I meant to say 2 miles.

If you were to drive from the house to the exchange it's exactly 2 miles. (According to Google maps).

Here is a screenshot of the map.

http://i.imgur.com/HsLXplc.png

Time to look for properties closer to the cabinet and see if they have FTTC listed. For those with very long cabinet to premises distances the FTTC option is sometimes missing.

I looked at the street prior to the street I'm moving to, and they do have FTTC.