Bonded ADSL

[The-Geek]

Hi,

Just wondered if anyone had any recommendations with regards to a bonded ADSL solution.

I'm currently looking at bonding 2 ADSL lines together in-order to get greater upload speed (i.e. if you upgrade from 512kbps to 1Mbps ADSL package you still only get 256kbps upload). With a bonded ADSL solution I would get 512kbps upload.

I see that Netgear have a suitable router (Bonded ADSL, Firewall, VPN Gateway, DMZ, QoS etc. etc.) coming out next month in the UK but wondered if anyone on here had already installed a bonded ADSL solution.

Regards



.

[silver]

I've been looking at this for a while - wondering when to go for it

the only real player as far as I can see is nildram.. (sorry pdf) http://www.nildram.net/pdf/bondedbroadband.pdf

in combination with linux box .. http://www.freestuffjunction.co.uk/bondedadsl.shtml

be wary of other adsl that on the surface looks like it's a bonded connecton - but read the small print it's actually load balancing (forgot who was offering that)

I don't know personally anyone who's tried bonding..

Sil

PS, check out bulldog as they do a LLU 8 meg down 400k up - some other single adsl that offer more than standard upload abt also

[The-Geek]

Hi,

Thanks for the info Silver.

Although this isn't exactly the solution I was looking for (already have a similar quote from my existing broadband provider) the information regarding the hardware set-up was extremely useful.

Looks like I'll be purchasing a Cisco 2160 sometime in the near future as I will be requiring an upload speed of approx 1Mb.

The main problem in my area (Somerset / Dorset) is that SDSL isn't available and is cost prohibitive.

The info on LLU is also useful but, I'm nowhere near one of the 240 or so exchanges that are LLU enabled ... and probably won't be for a very long time to come.

Regards




.

[silver]

ah - am in dorset,. which provider were you looking @ ?

I think andrews + arnold do a packet fiddled load balance thing - but it's not real bonding an it looked expensive in terms of kit..

I can get sdsl here but the cost is too much at the moment.. as you say the LLU isn't coming our way anytime soon (and it doesn't give that good an upload anyway)

what you doing that requires 1 meg up,. go on - can tell me

Sil

[The-Geek]

Hi,

In a nutshell ....

I have a client who has one head office and three satellite offices. They are looking to install a Terminal Services Server and utilize thin clients to connect to it in-order to have centralized information.

Given that the thin clients will use approx. 32kbps bandwidth and there are approx 30 users in the satellite offices this means that the head office is going to need in the region of 960kbps upload to service them.

I think you can see my predicament.

At the moment I'm thinking of using the Cisco 2160 + 4 x 512k broadband packages from our exisitng supplier. This will provide 2Mb download and the oh so important 1Mb upload.

Regards


.

[silver]

couldn't find anything on that cisco thing, do you have a spec page / what does it do ?

I guess if they had 4 sat offices with even distribution of users you could use 4 sep adsl lines - but much neater to bond them somehow

let us know how it goes

Sil

[The-Geek]

Hi Silver,

The spec page for the Cisco 2600 MX series can be found below:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/...0800c3263.html

The idea here is to bond / load balance four ADSL lines in the head office and two in each of the satellite offices (that's a total of 10 ADSL lines in total) this should give the required bandwidth upload at each site.

I have to check the spec's for the Cisco routers more closely but on first inspection it looks like the the Cisco 2600 Series is the only router that can bond / load balance 4 x 512k ADSL lines and provide QoS for VOIP.

Haven't touched a Cisco Router for a couple of years so I think that I'm going to be doing a refresher shortly !!

Regards



.

[silver]

Don't know anything abt cisco kit,. let us know if it works!

Sil

[StuC]

Did anyone get this going, is it reliable?

I'm in the same sort of situation as the-geek now, requiring 1M upstream and "all you can eat" down.

I will probably go for the cisco 2610, 2611 (both mentioned on the nildram page)
I think the boss is getting tired with my Linux everywhere theme ;-)

Any feedback would be great

Thanks

Stu

[The-Geek]

Hi Stu,

Funnily enuff I'm doing the original requirement fell through but I'm doing an install tomorrow for another client.

After throwing the idea around we have opted for the Cyclone 200 by Xrio / NetEye which seemed to have a fairly good review on ADSL Guide.

http://www.adslguide.org/hardware/re...cyclone200.asp

I was also chatting to a techy friend of mine who said that they use a device by DeanSoft - I think it was called a q-balancer. i haven't been able to find any reliable links to it today - but such are websites hosted in .tw and .cn )


Regards

[silver]

yes - am still interested in finding out more

note SDSL is getting cheaper (tho is still expensive!) bulldog are doing 2 meg sdsl for 160/month,. and their 8 meg down is 1/2 meg up (I've signed up to that to see how it goes)

Sil

[silver]

...

After throwing the idea around we have opted for the Cyclone 200 by Xrio / NetEye which seemed to have a fairly good review on ADSL Guide.

http://www.adslguide.org/hardware/re...cyclone200.asp

Originally Posted by The-Geek

from the link

After a couple of days of testing, We started to discover a range problems caused by the load balancing . Protocols such as FTP were behaving strangely, sometimes working and sometimes not. Online games which made use of UDP also suffered from severe packet loss and frequent loss of connection. ICQ randomly refused to connect and even browsing certain web pages was throwing a spanner into the works.

So, why does this happen? The main reason is due to source and destination IP addresses in combination with multiple connections to a specific remote host. When using FTP, a second connection is often established when transferring data (i.e. files). If the load balancer happens to choose the other connection from the one you are already using, the remote host will become confused and refuse to accept it.

it's "only" doing balancing (like round robin on each tcp connection) on traffic that is outbound,. typically it's not going to make say an ftp upload twice the speed - bonded adsl is a different thing, where the 'n' connections become one umm real connection and you get a proper link at twice the speeds

Sil

[StuC]

Cheers all,
I have made some enquiries for leased lines and if I could wait for the connection speed to get to 8M/500k up I could live with two ADSL bonded, but that's it, we need it soon.

I cant see SDSL getting to my town for a bit.

I guess I watch the real bonded stuff and see what comes up.

[silver]

nildram is the only place I've seen for true bonded and you'd need 4 lines to get 1m up

leased is hellish expensive

you can check whats in your local exchange on http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php

Sil

PS, I can get sdsl but I can't really justify the cost unfort

[The-Geek]

Sil,

Did you miss the bit about the firmware update that resolves the "problem" with FTP uploads?

Update: Firmware version 2.0 Rel 0G02 fixes ICQ and FTP connectivity issues in addition to providing support for email alerts on link failure and entries for up to 10 port bindings (instead of a restrictive 5). Note that we have not tested this version.

Time will tell if this device will allow an upload of 512 - my suspicions are that it will - nothing in the literature says it won't.


Regards

[silver]

right - but look at how it works,. it can use 2 different ISPs and all the 'magic' is done at the client end (there's nothing special on the ISPs side).

for it to give you umm proper bonding it would have to be bonded at the ISP side also,.. the only way they could 'fake' it to get double the upload would be to split the ftp stream across the 'n' connections which is generally not going to be supported at the ftp server side.

Sil

[The-Geek]

Sil,

Your absolutely right - this isn't true bonding, but it is a case of balancing two things:

a) What the client wants &
b) How much the client is prepared to pay for it

I have laid out a number of options for the client and these are currently "under discussion".

I guess I'll have an answer to the dilema soon as they want some form of "enhanced connectivity" in place.

Regards

[silver]

all depends how much money they want to throw at it

2 meg sdsl is nice if you can afford it,. I've got my bulldog connection setup and it will upload constant at 60KBs,.

regards bonding, you said

Sil,
Time will tell if this device will allow an upload of 512 - my suspicions are that it will

Originally Posted by The-Geek

and the non-bonded / load balanced solution I don't think will be able to upload at that speed? (well not to an ftp server - unless you are doing 2 concurrent uploads - and then it should)

Sil

[Memfis]

ah - am in dorset,. which provider were you looking @ ?

I think andrews + arnold do a packet fiddled load balance thing - but it's not real bonding an it looked expensive in terms of kit..

Sil

Originally Posted by silver

also provide proper bonding, failover and other solutions.

http://www.aaisp.net.uk/aa/adsl/multiline.html

[Memfis]

True bonding uses the mlppp protocol. according to your linked website all they do is packet routing using multiple pipes. This can be quite effective but isn't bonding. There are several devices that can accomplish this, some cheaper than the one you've linked to.

Also see the review of their kit lower down this page from an adsl review site.

[patioheater]

Rural Internet do bonded, but it ain't cheap, don't let the site put you off either. If you want the bosses direct line to discuss your requirements(new packages arriving all the time) drop me a pm. He prides himself on quality connections so if you don't ask you don't get!

be wary of other adsl that on the surface looks like it's a bonded connecton - but read the small print it's actually load balancing (forgot who was offering that)

Originally Posted by silver

Good point, load balancing and bonding are completely different. Load-balancing will schedule a session on a single line and therefore you won't get the speed acceleration. Bonding however does the aggregation in a smaller granularity to provide real speed.

There is a technology, if I understand it correctly, it is similar to MLPPP but doesn't need the carrier equipment (since it is implementation in layer 4). This avoids any coordination requirement from the ISP, you can even bond various ISPs together with single network appliance.

edit sil,. sure you have either bonding or some form of load balancing,. - see also reply below

[silver]

you say layer 4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model ?) so that's at the transport layer and as earlier it's not bonding, many (most?) protocols are not designed to run across 2 separate connections

it's confusing if someone is trying to find out about actual bonding to refer them to something which is not adsl bonding,. as before unless you have actual equipment on the ISP side (or somewhere across the i'net) then you don't have bonding?

[Miss Piggy]

Bit of an old thread, but always worth getting the facts straight as people will search for these kinds of things.

Silver is right, true bonding needs equipment in a datacentre somewhere that then provides you with your combined internet connection. If all of your lines are into that ISP then it makes bonding much, much better as you then aren’t bonding over the internet but across their internal network.

Bonded ADSL is available from a number of providers in the UK. Check out Evolving Networks bonded ADSL pages - http://www.evolving-networks.co.uk/d...?contentID=644. They do bonded ADSL specifically over private ADSL links so it keeps the latency right down, and consistent across the links being bonded.

There is definitely growing use of bonded connectivity, as regardless of what the likes of BT say with their billions invested in fibre, it’s always going to be for people close to the exchange, and even then only for 40-60% of the UK in the short term. All those other businesses are going to need something to keep up, and bonded ADSL at least means people far away from the exchange can catch up a bit and get some better download and upload!

[tommy t]

Be* were trialling it bonded adsl via their llu , they may now be offering it,giving upto 48mb d/load and upto 5mb upload.annex 'm'