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[meritez]

bonding will not change the bandwidth on a vpn, you are still limited by the upload speed of the vpn server.

I'll give an example, I have a vpn client that can connect to a vpn server on a 24/1 ADSL connection, the fastest speed my vpn client can download over the vpn is 1, as that is the upload bandwidth of the ADSL connection.

[bignose2]

Hi,
I did wonder, seemed strange as I had so much spare speed but as it is fine on Virgin & most of her colleges who have really fast FTTC or FTTP do not have a problem I just figured the VPN overhead somehow just coped better if the raw speed was really high.

I don't know much about VPN's, never really used myself but read some have well over 70% loss, even up to 90% but improved when they got better services.

It is a really, really big company & whilst I guess they can be lazy & often the worst I would think v.well resourced.

I always come back to, never, ever had a problem at boyfriends but frequently had to get in the car at my house & go there & carried on working fine.

Is not a deal breaker anyway, I have the two lines & going to be years to FTTP so unless cost's a fortune prefer to just get it sorted now.

So disappointed as a month ago, hoards of BT engineers swarmed down our lane. Great I thought FTTP. Turns out Point To Point for a resident, up & past my house & business. I know different tech but why they don't either offer or pull more cables through as they go.
I guess if the cabinet is not ready but when aiming to roll out FTTP to as many as possible, why not do it then!

I know a lot still on ADSL but we were v.slow to get FTTC and don't think a handful of houses and couple of business are going to be anytime, soon/ever.

[Weaver]

My bonded setup multiplies the speed of single flows upstream or downstream, single transfers. So should double the speed of your VPN. My upstream speeds are very ill-matched for some reason so things are complicated; out-of-order packet delivery could be a danger in some situations and receiving system might whine about that or go somewhat slower than double. If your lines are the same as one another then things are quite simple.

[g3uiss]

Have you discounted load balancing

[Weaver]

Does "load balancing" mean assigning different flows to various pipes, requiring multiple flows to be present ?

[g3uiss]

Essential yes. It’s like a bonded line on multi thread, without the cost. I have 2 x FTTC and 1 4G session based load balanced. A speed test on a multi thread gives the sun of all three 

[bignose2]

Hi,

I was preferring the idea of proper bonding.

Many years ago I did load balancing on adsl, it worked pretty well & had its uses but did not really double up on the speed a lot of the time, it also would complain/error sometimes (& I really cannot remember when or where) but www's knew it was from two different IP's & security on www's would have issue but really don't go on my v.old memories if thinking of trying.

Speed checkers seem to be able to report the full combined speeds but often downloading or streaming just used one or the other that was allocated  from the router.
Might be different now & better routers etc.

I would be interested in the experience of the previous poster, can't see the name whilst replying.

[Weaver]

A few notes about the graph image I posted earlier: The key to the graphs is on the extreme right, may need to scroll.

Just after midnight until 02:00 you can see live streaming video being transmitted at 3 x 1 = 3 Mbps. The downstream speeds of the three lines are fairly close to equal, upstream is a different story. At around 04:50 there’s a short upload, flat out - notice the flat tops of lines 2 and 4. Line 1 has the fastest upstream by far, so the behaviour of TCP means that it’s not completely maxed out. At 11:00 you see an enormous upload taking half an hour; this was a backup of an iPad I suspect.

Line 0 "Dongle (3G) for FB" shows a burst of packet loss (red) at around 12:40 and a decrease in latency (dark blue). This is some kind of weird problem where a 3G USB NIC connected to my Firebrick router disconnects and reconnects to the 3G network, for reasons unknown. Should ask AA what they think about it. The packet loss has been detected by AA’s servers because they send a PPP LCP echo request (other type of ping) every few seconds and if they don’t get a reply then this is shown on the graph as red coming down from the top, the height indicating the percentage of PPP packets lost.

[g3uiss]

It’s changed a lot since then. I don’t know of any servers that don’t like multiple IP’s, I’ve never had an issue. Many users on here use this technique. But, you can always route a single IP to the preserver if necessary. My thruput for all uses is certainly good. My services only give 20/2 at best ( 4G better but variable)

[Weaver]

I ought to explain that the internet only sees one IP address as the endpoint of a flow when the flow is split three ways. The server at the other end and routers in the middle have no way of knowing about the existence of the line bonding as it’s all hidden by the Firebrick routers at AA and my own Firebrick.

The service charge cost is literally zero. AA doesn’t charge anything for bonding. You need to buy or rent a Firebrick which must be the higher software variant called "fully loaded" and you need to pay for two lines unless you’re using the Office::1 package which includes the cost of three lines iirc. That’s one of the all-you-can eat services where you can download as much as you want without extra charges.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I'd have to agree with full bonding here, as it sounds like the problem is mostly the lack of upload bandwidth.

[aesmith]

I imagine could be a multitude of reasons but her VPN (cisco anyconnect) slows to a crawl on my internet.

I don't see why Anyconnect would need appreciably more bandwidth.  There's a bit of overhead of course with the IPsec and UDP encapsulation but that wouldn't be a big percentage. Have you looked at round trip times from home to her VPN head end, via each of your two ISPs?  I'm assuming that her VPN works OK from other Internet connections, and that she is a normal end-user type user and therefore downloading more than she uploads.

[Chunkers]

I also have 2 ADSL connections at home which I load balance and it works great, especially if you have multiple users, but its also true it doesn't function exactly like a single connection for single stream applications - for this you are right you need a bonded connection. I haven't had any issues with multiple IP's myself. 

Personally I decided not to go down this route as it was much more expensive, it sounds like you have a different usage case to me.

I am waiting for a (realistically priced) FTTP option to decommission the second line, unfortunately I live in the boonies.

[bignose2]

Hi,
I was the original poster.

Have ordered from A&A, 2 new lines to take over the Zen & Vodafone.
Switch over 22nd Feb so will report back.
Very helpful sales & tech.

Most don't talk about cost but I would have found it helpful so here it is.
Line 1 £35 - less  than 2) but I have to add my own voice
Line 2 £45 - to inc. line rental (no voice)
£20 FireBrick Rental (might buy outright at some point but are v.expensive)
£16 voice line rental to go with Line 1
All + VAT. (bonding included) Soho 1.
Pretty sure accurate but would not want to put someone off or encourage if I have made a mistake.

Around £55 inc VAT pm more than I was paying for the 2 lines but for me worth it.

Would have had to buy a new router to load balance and in my case have BT move one socket which I did not really want, in a slightly remote location, business office & as a fail safe can still plug direct to the BT socket there. 60m between. (easy to run a Cat6 for the modem to firebrick)

Thank for all your advise.

[vic0239]

£20 FireBrick Rental (might buy outright at some point but are v.expensive)

This was my setup before I moved to FTTP and it worked flawlessly. I now have a Firebrick FB2700 which I no longer have any need for if you are interested. Granted not the latest model, but "fully loaded" and has a new power supply. I had it out recently to update the firmware and it still does the job.