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[Bubbles]

Good afternoon everyone

Eek first post on the forums.
Glad to meet you all

As the title suggests, I am considering getting a 2nd line to my property. I have an asus router and was considering running the dual wan feature or get the lines bonded for more speed. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but everyone here seems to be super tech savvy.

I am currently on a Plus Net ADSL package.
I am not disappointed with their service but I have noticed some threads pop up with packet loss or peak time congestion, and recently with my own testing I have noticed the same. I do not want to cancel my service with them but would rather have a 2nd line to ensure stability at all times.

What are your opinions on getting a 2nd line from say Sky (As they and talk talk are the only LLU providers on my exchange). We are not in a fibre area and can only get adsl for now.

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for any input and ideas I have many more questions but just wanted to start with this one

[d2d4j]

Hi bubbles

We do a lot with multiplexers, load balancers and bonding.

If you can afford it, I'd go with bonding, more resilient, better speed and failover, but load balancers will work, however they are not fully resilient, and you can set each to failover on each line.

We use draytek, which I have always found to be reliable but are not cheap to buy.

Are you a business user as I have only ever known businesses who use the above.

Many thanks

John

[Bubbles]

It is a residential address.
I work in financial services, however I do currency trading as a hobby.

Because of this, the small delays and ping spikes can sometimes cost me a fair bit.
My wife is often playing games or streaming movies, and while this seems to be okay with my current setup, I would like something that would give me higher stability if possible.

I currently use an Asus AC87-U, but I am willing to consider a draytek model if they prove to be better.
I would like to preserve my router if possible as it is faily new.

You mentioned price, what options do I have ?
Could you PM me a link of prices if you work for a company that does what I am looking for ?

Thank you for your quick reply

Bubbles

[d2d4j]

Hi bubbles

I'm sorry I cannot give prices, but a google would bring lots of companies who offer bonding.

There is another option, and that is just to have a dedicated line just for your work, and leave the current line you have for household.

If anything happened to your work line, it should be easy to quickly change over to household line.

If your going with second line, I would tend to use Bt but I'm sure others would disagree or have their own preference.

Many thanks

John

[Dray]

You can achieve load balancing of two lines very easily using PfSense as a router. It doesn't need to be a business.
I think your reasoning is sound.

[kitz]

Line bonding can work out expensive as it needs support from the ISP and both lines need to be provisioned by the same ISP.
Load balancing would be a better option if you want to use 2 different ISPs for resilience against one particular ISP.   

You could also look at bonding using MLPPP for a cheaper solution.
Most people tend to use PfSence for load balancing 2 different lines. 

The other point to bear in mind is that the way Sky set up their network authentication so that its difficult to use your own router & wouldn't perhaps make sky the ideal choice as the 2nd ISP.

[Dray]

Someone got Sky Fibre working on PfSense here https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=48663.msg260065#msg260065

[Bubbles]

Wow, many interesting replies, thanks for the input everyone. Many google searches went on this morning, many new terms and stuff

I am still learning how this works, all these 2nd line options are new to me.

My idea is to use my current connection as a primary or main service. I will connect this to the phone line via a Billion 8800NL, as I find it gives better results so far from my TP link 8817 (I am on a short line), maybe chipset matching as discussed on Kitz main site.
This weekend proved to give very good results, however TBB reports show higher than expected packet loss at times.
I was concerned by this, but I wonder if maybe the TP link is not set up correctly. I will leave the Billion plugged in tonight to see if anything changes.

I was thinking of getting another line from any other recommeneded ISP and use their router/modem as this will just be a bridge to the main connection, both of these will then connect to the main router ie the Asus or Draytek if I get one.

Kitz is right, after exploring the solutions in terms of cost, line bonding is very costly if all I want is reliability and not throughput.

Not sure if anyone would know, but would a fail over solution be better, via a 4g dongle or something ?
I considered this, however Sky has offered me a 2nd line for a very small set up fee then just my normal line rental and adsl subscription. This seems to be similarly priced to a 4g plan with the advantage of being unlimited and well, wired > wireless for me I think.

I have tried to read more about pfsence, but I think I might be a bit silly this morning, I dont really understand what it does or its intended purpose. Sorry for being slow

My TBB if anyone wants to see:

[Dray]

pfSense is a software router that you can run on a PC or other device, but you would probably be better off with a piece of hardware that will do the load balancing for you

[boost]

For more stability/resilience, is an extra copper pair really going to help?

If you get someone poking around in the PCP, you could end up with both pairs disconnected anyway. From a tech perspective, having two lines gets you major kudos but 4G is crazy fast these days and almost certainly more reliable than more copper served from the same cabs.

[Bubbles]

Thanks for your input boost.
Umm with 4g, I see where you are coming from, but the issue I have is that I am ment to have 4g on my phone and I never get it in our house, even though my provider says it is perfect indoors and out.

By using 4g, I would use it more as a failover rather than a load balance, as I still notice higher pings with 4g than copper cable.

Not to discount from your point, as it is still a good idea that I will look into further

[boost]

Yeh, it's not something I would go for either if it was coming out of my own pocket

I don't know if anyone support it retail but ADSL2+ apparently supports bonding, EFM style (PTM mode / IEEE 802.3ah-2004). Native bonding at the port would be awesome if you can find someone who sells it, everything else would be a bit meh in comparision

[Dray]

Port bonding comes with it's own unique problems and doesn't overcome your objections about being on the same cable. I prefer loadbalancing with 2 different ISP's and maybe 3g/4g failover like a Draytek can provide.

[Bubbles]

So left my connection to do its thing for a week or so now.

I have some concerns about my packet loss from 6pm onward. I understand that there might be come congestion issues with Plusnet?
Either way, things seemed okay at home till we had some guests over...Someone was watching some on demand TV, and my wife fired up a game. She was playing lol and noticed the pings went from 25-78ms spiking up and down for the whole evening. We disconnected everything and pings became more stable.

I tried to monitor stuff over the weekend and noticed some strange things. Sometimes I would ping stuff and get a ping of 25 ms to the lol servers for an entire match, then join another one and get 35-40ms. I don't actually play online games anymore, but for the other people at home I want things more stable. The strange thing is that while the spikes persisted on Friday night, it was perfectly fine streaming stuff at 1080p while gaming at 25ms over Sunday night.

I was looking into getting AAISP as a 2nd isp for load balancing but I dont know what the net effect will be. Essentially, I know there are certain limits to not having fibre and the bandwidth it provides, though if it can handle the streaming + gaming on Sunday, why was it so spikey on Friday. There was nothing else online during those times as the wifi was turned off and I was checking traffic from the devices via the modem.

Sorry for my long posts, have a great day