I registered my interest in this product from BE ages ago as I have a second line into my house.

They projected a few months ago that the price would be 2xPro Price + "a Little more". Instead its 3xPro price plus £85 connection.

I wont see any other products here for a while , but my current line will have to do I think. Love the write ups on the router though. Clever bit of kit.

We had bonded lines at work for around 18 months. Ours was through Timico, but the actual service was Sharedband

3x 6mb ADSL lines bonded with 3 netgear ADSL routers with some custom firmware, gave us about 18meg for around £120 a month.

It worked relatively well, although there were times when it was a bit hit and miss - it was never as reliable as our other single ADSL connection in terns of up-time, even though they were both connected to the same exchange.

It is impressive and i admire BE for giving the option.. i guess its an alternative to the fast virgin media connections and itll be better than FTTC at the moment too.

To be honest I don't think that's bad. If you are relatively close to the exchange where else can you get 40+mb download but more importantly 5mb upload..

Not a bad deal I reckon.

To be honest I don't think that's bad. If you are relatively close to the exchange where else can you get 40+mb download but more importantly 5mb upload..

Not a bad deal I reckon.

Exactly - upload is king. Beats paying £££s for an SDSL connection.

Ill be changing to BE from Plus.net soon

pointless me going for that service.. 2x 1.4 aint worth 65 sheets lol

There are a select few from the BE forums that have had this service almost 6 months. They were all added to it manually. I believe there has been almost no issues with the service. If I was closer to the exchange then I would consider it more seriously, as has been said it would be far more desirable than BT's FTTC. Would trust BE any day , but BT GTF!

I'm sure FTTC will be mainstream soon. Can't see many people taking up FTTC with BT. I certainly wont be and will be waiting for BE to offer it and ill be first in the queue. According to BT I will get the full 40MB and 20MB uploads. I'll have some of that compared to only getting 5MB on ADSL2!!

There are a select few from the BE forums that have had this service almost 6 months. They were all added to it manually. I believe there has been almost no issues with the service. If I was closer to the exchange then I would consider it more seriously, as has been said it would be far more desirable than BT's FTTC. Would trust BE any day , but BT GTF!

Yeah, ive been keeping up to date with the BE blog as they have been investigating and doing surveys on FTTC... seems the hurdle at the moment will be BT lol.. at the moment BT wont farm out the FTTC tech to any other isp.. and when they do, the upload will be gimped (which is one of the most important aspects)

From a technical standpoint, im interested by the line bonding.. i guess the max throughput would only be reached with several concurrent connections (not a problem with bittorent/usenet really) as in the networking world link aggregation still can only route a single session down a single route.

I'm sure FTTC will be mainstream soon. Can't see many people taking up FTTC with BT. I certainly wont be and will be waiting for BE to offer it and ill be first in the queue. According to BT I will get the full 40MB and 20MB uploads. I'll have some of that compared to only getting 5MB on ADSL2!!

FTTC will all be through BT as BT has been given the rights to not have to hand over control.

Makes sense really as they paid for it and have to make their money back.

I dont need FTTC, I live 200yards from the exchange.

What I need is for my exchange to become LLU'd so I can enter the post 2006 broadband era.

From a technical standpoint, im interested by the line bonding.. i guess the max throughput would only be reached with several concurrent connections (not a problem with bittorent/usenet really) as in the networking world link aggregation still can only route a single session down a single route.

On our service, the maximum throughput was for the combined lines, so even a single download would run at 18mbps.

Not sure how they did it, but I assume there was a box of tricks at the exchange that split the link down, then it was recombined back with the routers and their custom firmware. I was a bit dubious about it at first, but we ran VoIP over it, and it was fine.

On our service, the maximum throughput was for the combined lines, so even a single download would run at 18mbps.

Not sure how they did it, but I assume there was a box of tricks at the exchange that split the link down, then it was recombined back with the routers and their custom firmware. I was a bit dubious about it at first, but we ran VoIP over it, and it was fine.

But surely latency would suffer as the receiving end would have to buffer packets in order to reconstruct them...

But surely latency would suffer as the receiving end would have to buffer packets in order to reconstruct them...

I thought that, but it was absolutley fine. We had about 5 or 6 calls running over it most of the day.

We had a fair few dropouts initially, causing doubt over the type of the connection, but after a bit of tracing of the problem, we found that it was caused by one of the routes between Ireland and here being a bit flakey. After we proved to the ISP that the connection was suffering somewhere in the middle, they re-routed our traffic over another backbone, and it was solid ever since.

Edited 14 September, 201015 yr by softscoop

Services like this use MLPPP.

It is not strictly an IP bit slicing thing as such (since it is a proper encapsulation protocol), but it does not rely on IP or TCP connection load balancing (IIRC).

I am sure there will be a very small increase in latency as the A and B ends will have to recombine the data streams from the two (or more) connections. But unless you are running somthing real time, or waving latency willies in online gaming I doubt it would be more than 1 or 2 ms at most. It should all be done in hardware.

The larger issue is probably that the link is dependant upon the stability of BOTH connections, if one drops the whole thing goes down.

So it is a bandwidth improvement, not a reliability improvement IP balancers or (more ideally) BGP is the solution to reliability.

Services like this use MLPPP.

It is not strictly an IP bit slicing thing as such (since it is a proper encapsulation protocol), but it does not rely on IP or TCP connection load balancing (IIRC).

I am sure there will be a very small increase in latency as the A and B ends will have to recombine the data streams from the two (or more) connections. But unless you are running somthing real time, or waving latency willies in online gaming I doubt it would be more than 1 or 2 ms at most. It should all be done in hardware.

The larger issue is probably that the link is dependant upon the stability of BOTH connections, if one drops the whole thing goes down.

So it is a bandwidth improvement, not a reliability improvement IP balancers or (more ideally) BGP is the solution to reliability.

We did have one line go down for a few days, and after about 30 seconds of the routers reconfiguring themselves, it was working fine again, all be it at a reduced speed.

Services like this use MLPPP.

It is not strictly an IP bit slicing thing as such (since it is a proper encapsulation protocol), but it does not rely on IP or TCP connection load balancing (IIRC).

I am sure there will be a very small increase in latency as the A and B ends will have to recombine the data streams from the two (or more) connections. But unless you are running somthing real time, or waving latency willies in online gaming I doubt it would be more than 1 or 2 ms at most. It should all be done in hardware.

The larger issue is probably that the link is dependant upon the stability of BOTH connections, if one drops the whole thing goes down.

So it is a bandwidth improvement, not a reliability improvement IP balancers or (more ideally) BGP is the solution to reliability.

ahh okies!.. cheers

I dont need FTTC, I live 200yards from the exchange.

What I need is for my exchange to become LLU'd so I can enter the post 2006 broadband era.

However what everyone in rural land who wants/needs broadband needs is FTTC so they can get a speed better than 1Mbit if you're lucky.

Edited 16 September, 201015 yr by cheezemonkhai

Indeed they do.

Indeed they do.

Lol , love it.

BT Infinity @ 40MB down and 2MB up is less than I'm currently paying for unlimited 2MB down and apparently my exchange is enabled and LLU'd.

Strange though, I haven't seen any roadside cable laying going on locally (Though someone was laying blue conduit (Water ?) on the main road at the beginning of the year).

I presume that FTTC means optic fibre from the exchange to the roadside cabinet and that would mean extensive cable laying in this copper only 1900-1930s residential area. There is a Telewest (Now Virgin) cable system laid in to all roads round here in the early 1990s. Would BT have patched into that ?

Postscript

Just checked my line for availability/speed of Infinity. BT says it won't be available until the new year and will only have approx 20MB down and 8MB up. That's a bit different from the national advertising - and I'm only 1.5 Km from the exchange. BT says I can get 5MB down on the post 2006 Total Broadband service. There's only £6 a month diffrence in price !

Nick

Edited 26 September, 201015 yr by Clunkclick

Chances are they've routed it through the copper runs and put new hardware into the cabinet - around here though we have new cabinets next to old ones but i think they might be Virgin ones.