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Author Topic: FTTC Line Bonding?  (Read 19784 times)

Bowdon

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FTTC Line Bonding?
« on: February 06, 2016, 11:23:52 AM »

I'm sure this question must have been asked before. But are there any ISP's that offer FTTC Line Bonding?

I'm not even sure its possible. I'm thinking it might be as I know ADSL used to be able to do it. But it was dependent on the ISP.

Are there any ISP's that offer this service?
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Dray

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #1 on: February 06, 2016, 11:55:26 AM »

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Weaver

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #2 on: February 06, 2016, 02:51:11 PM »

AA do this. I use it. It's independent of the lower layer protocols, it just uses IP. (So not like ML-PPP for example where support for it has to be built into the lower layer systems.)

I have three ADSL2 lines bonded together. If one line fails, the load spreading picks it up within a few seconds and the other lines alone are scheduled, so everything carries on as normal.
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Weaver

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #3 on: February 06, 2016, 02:55:48 PM »

It's just the same with FTTC, from what I've read. So you could bind four FTTC pipes together to get 320 Mbps if you wanted to and were lucky enough to get a whole 80 Mbps per pipe.
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Bowdon

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #4 on: February 06, 2016, 09:55:17 PM »

It's just the same with FTTC, from what I've read. So you could bind four FTTC pipes together to get 320 Mbps if you wanted to and were lucky enough to get a whole 80 Mbps per pipe.

*Rant on*
That would be a good idea. Hmm imagine doing that with 4 G.fast enabled lines.. I'd be zooming around the net  ;D

I had a look at the AA website. I don't understand why it is so expensive. Also why do they still have usage caps on their products?

The FTTC seems to be mixed in the Home: 1 package, though it mainly talks about ADSL with a cap of 100gb's a month for £25. You can buy 50gb slots for another £10 (or increase speeds to FTTC). In this day and age people can easily go over 100gb's, especially with fibre.

The Office: 1 apparently as fibre lines. But look at this price list;

Quote
Service                                                   One-off cost   Ongoing cost
Two line Office::1    (200GB)                           £500+VAT           £200+VAT pcm
Three line Office::1 (200GB)                           £600+VAT           £225+VAT pcm
Two line Office::1    (300GB)                           £500+VAT           £275+VAT pcm
Three line Office::1 (300GB)                           £600+VAT           £300+VAT pcm
Office::1                 10TB with ADSL backup   £500+VAT           £300+VAT pcm
Top-up 50GB when over allowance                   £50+VAT

Why is there an ongoing cost? It just seems to me these companies are pricing themselves out of the market. If they lowered their rates and got more people onboard then they would sell more of their products.

I like it that AA is trying to break away from the current trends in the industry. But its a real shame they have such high prices.

I know the guy is well liked on here. If I'm missing something about line maintenance that puts the price up to big money, over and above what BT would do if a fibre line went down then can I hear the justification for it?

As I mentioned in another thread, I like the outlaws promoting new technology and pushing innovation through. That's why I supported Be internet, and thats also why I like Hyperoptic, Gigaclear and B4RN for breaking new boundaries. AA could also be in this group if they wanted to be.

I'd say 2 unlimited download fibre lines would be worth between £50 and £60 per month. If they offered that package I'm sure quite a few of the heavy usage home users would pay it.

*Rant off*
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c6em

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #5 on: February 06, 2016, 10:17:20 PM »

I suspect that:

1. AA don't want the type of consumer that downloads the entire internet every month. 
2. Part of the high price will be to do with the exemplary service I understand you get particularly with faults and generally acting on your behalf fighting battles with BTOR by staff at AA who really know their stuff, so do not come on a minimum wage..  All this has to be paid for.

AA are in the same market sub-sector type as say bespoke hifi-shops - if you want a superb service and some high cost equipment all setup professionally in the house, then you go to them.  If you are not bothered you buy something off the web from Amazon and the rest.
Likewise say Aston Martin or Morgan in the car business: low volume, very high prices for people willing to pay for a perceived difference.
These niche sub-sectors survive while there are enough people willing to pay more for such a service.  They may continue ad-infinitum or, if the numbers willing to pay dwindle then they may not.  Alternatively the market and circumstances may change, develop, move on such that the bespoke service offered is no longer appropriate or needed.

I half think RevK rants about the snoopers charter bill is less about a concern over the deterioration in all our 'rights', 'privacy' etc than a worry that as his costs start to escalate and as BB generally gets more reliable then a future for niche BB suppliers like AA may not exist and AA may go to the wall.


« Last Edit: February 06, 2016, 10:21:28 PM by c6em »
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Weaver

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #6 on: February 07, 2016, 01:58:35 AM »

I think that the tariff choices and general (but not complete!) lack of all-you-can eat tariffs is to do with preserving the zero-congestion network (as far as the transit and wholesale backhaul suppliers will allow). AA doesn't have to do traffic shaping or anything horrendous of that ilk.

I wanted line bonding and IPv6, when I was out shopping for an ISP. I wasn't interested in any kind of posh customer service, in fact didn't know about it. I saw AA was very well loved on ISPReview and had consistently good user reviews. I was also Impressed by the "we'll fix your line or your money back" no-nonsense approach. In the end, Zen was out because of the endless wait for IPv6, although I did trial Zen. But in the end Zen failed on both IPv6 and line bonding fronts and were out of the race.

The Firebrick and the fact that AA are co-designers of it are real powerful reasons to use them, because the FB is superb and AA can really support it, that I've found very useful.

But the reality for this user is that posh customer service was not a factor, but now I'm a customer, I can't face the thought of ever having to talk to idiots on a telephone and not being able to view, control and change parameters myself.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about AA. You have to ask real customers to find out what really matters. Most of the customers I've talked to are very experienced to ultra-knowledgeable, are Linux geeks, and have zero tolerance for idiot customer service scripts
« Last Edit: February 08, 2016, 04:01:13 AM by Weaver »
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Bowdon

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #7 on: February 07, 2016, 10:25:39 PM »

In my 'rant' post I was typing it more out of frustration. Because AA is so close to getting more customers from the non-specialist customer base they usually get. I appreciate that they give the personal touch when dealing with customers and connection problems. I know when I was at Be it was good talking to people who really cared about the issues I was having.

It just saddens me when I was reading about the new Home: 1 Terebyte package. Though kind of expensive it would be within reason. Then I read that if a person goes over the package limit then they will cap the speed to 3Mbps! There is no option to buy a top-up.

I'm wondering if there are any other ISP's that would do FTTC bonding. Does the ISP have to do anything on their side? or is it all done at the EU side with the modem / router ?

Is it a complicated procedure to setup line bonding? I think there would be a big take up for line bonding, even ADSL style too.

I'm not an excessive downloader, though I'd say I might at one stage been above average. I'm abit too old these days to be downloading anything I can grab  ;D But I still would be interested in  fibre line bonding. I'd be prepared to pay at least double. As I joked the other day, imagine the speed of 2 G.fast connections. I'd be high on speed!  :lol:
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burakkucat

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #8 on: February 07, 2016, 11:00:10 PM »

Proper line bonding will require configuration at the CP/ISP's end as well as at the user's end. As Weaver will attest . . .
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Weaver

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #9 on: February 08, 2016, 04:06:35 AM »

Some of AA's packages give you a choice of what you want to happen when the paid-for amount of GB is exceeded. This is to protect the person paying the bill, and is an extremely good thing.
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Weaver

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #10 on: February 08, 2016, 05:08:24 AM »

Line bonding requires a tin box of some kind at both ends. I have three lines going through a Firebrick 2500 router at my end. At AA's end there will be - I suspect - a Firebrick FB 6000 series which splits a stream of IP packets three ways heading for my different lines. AA get live information from BT or TalkTalk Wholesale as to how fast each of the individual lines' downstream pipes is running at any particular instant and this information is used to split the IP stream in the correct ratio when it's scheduled by the FB6000 to go into the three pipes. If one of the pipes goes down, then AA load splitting takes action within about ten seconds and knocks that pipe out of the scheduling algorithm, so having load spreading helps reliability too, the service just goes slower if I lose one or more of the pipes.

In the upstream direction, my Firebrick 2500 splits traffic across the three lines in a similar way. Unfortunately I don't have a near real-time feed of info telling me how fast each upstream pipe is going, so I have to put the relevant numbers into the Firebrick config in order to get the right load splitting ratios. Which is a nuisance.

The system works very well indeed and takes action really quickly when a line goes down so the rescheduling is seamless. The lines are probed every few seconds using PPP packets so the system knows if a line is really working as opposed to just being supposedly working.
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Dray

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #11 on: February 08, 2016, 09:39:40 AM »

Unfortunately I don't have a near real-time feed of info telling me how fast each upstream pipe is going, so I have to put the relevant numbers into the Firebrick config in order to get the right load splitting ratios. Which is a nuisance.
That's interesting, it sounds like you're carrying out a manual process. Is there no way to script this?
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Weaver

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #12 on: February 08, 2016, 10:00:50 AM »

> is there no way to script this?

No, the Firebrick 2500 has no way of altering the ratios dynamically, and would need the addition of an API to fix this.

Getting hold of the numbers is messy. I check the latest upstream bandwidth figures given in the AA "clueless" control panel server's system logs. An API to query those values is needed too, otherwise it would mean trying to interrogate the web UI (hopefully valid XHTML but you never know) which would be somewhere between a bit hacky and not so bad.
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Weaver

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #13 on: February 08, 2016, 10:07:14 AM »

Currently I just check the system logs every once in a while to see if anything dramatic about the line's characteristics has made the lines' upstream bandwidth change. I keep a little note of the latest values in a little iPad spreadsheet and edit the Firebrick's XML config file if necessary (and reboot it, to make changes take effect).
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Dray

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Re: FTTC Line Bonding?
« Reply #14 on: February 08, 2016, 10:11:27 AM »

I thought XML was an API :)
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