In reply to a post by adebov:

Ever tried overriding that sort of thing using the clunky user interface in something like the HomeHub, or the kiddy cartoon user interface in a Speedtouch/Thomson ADSL router?

It's easy enough on a Speedtouch/Thomson/Technocolor - telnet to it, set it up and ignore the infantile GUI.

In reply to a post by Uilebheist:

It's easy enough on a Speedtouch/Thomson/Technocolor - telnet to it, set it up and ignore the infantile GUI.

That's pretty much how I did anything on my Speedtouch

Thanks for all the replied guys. Esp thanks to Ade.

I have gone with Plusnet, Sky, BE and Tesco.

Load Balancing will be managed by a pfSense running as a VM. The DSL modems provided will be or be swapped for Techi colors (Of which I have four!).

In reply to a post by sparkphase:

Load Balancing will be managed by a pfSense running as a VM.

Fairly similar to the "something more ingenious" approach I was talking about (basically a Linux PC running as a router/load balancer). Pretty power hungry if you use a PC running 24/7 but if you're using a VM and the PC/server was going to be running anyway that's not really an issue.
Technicolor ADSL modem/routers (aka Speedtouch, aka Thomson) can be set to bridge mode (rather than router mode) and they're pretty good routers (apart from the kiddie cartoon GUI) so good choices all round.

I wonder if there's an ARM build for pfSense - would be great to get it running on a £25 Raspberry Pi with the 700MHz ARM11 CPU, although you'd need to get four Ethernet ports into the thing via USB (which may well slow it down a little)!

Edited by adebov (Fri 25-Jan-13 20:49:13)

FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi is being worked on, but it's some way from being a finished product at present. However, Raspberry Pi will never make a good pfSense box as it has one Ethernet port, which is a USB Ethernet controller.

If you want a low power pfSense box, there's several embedded x86 boards available.