Had a fun conversation with someone yesterday - was very much a passing comment at the end of a meeting, along the lines of "shame you can't do anything to make my home internet faster".
Alex and I immediately said "we can double the speed", and he was really sort of sceptical - heard this sort of thing before - and explained that "no, he is on a farm in the middle of nowhere, so nobody can get anything faster".
Turns out that he is in an area which only has BT 20CN lines, and they something like 5km line length.
We explained that whatever speed he can get now we can double it - it is really really simple - we just put in two lines and not one. We explained it means a second phone line, and there may be issues with lack line plant, and so on, but that a second line is usually no problem.
Turns out he has a second phone line for business use anyway, so making it two internet services is really simple, and, of course, means we can just double his speed.
It seems strange that more people do not realise this. We are not the only people that will bond multiple broadband lines. It is not rocket science. But people are just resigned to having a slow service and expect that is the end of the matter.
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I think that's mainly because of the cost, yes you will get a faster service but it also means paying through the nose for not just a second broadband link but also line rental. Total it all up and you’re often left hovering around £100 a month, which is well over what most would be willing to pay.
ReplyDeleteOn top of that don't most old ADSL/ADSL2+ bonding solutions lose some performance, so it's unlikely to practically double his usable broadband speed? Similarly we have found that some homes don't have a spare copper line in the first place.
Mark
ISPreview.co.uk
Two lines should not have any overhead - the only issue is how well TCP stacks handle the bit of packet re-ordering. On top of which ISPs like us charge very little for a second line on the same usage. I am trying to work out a sensible way to do extra lines on the new Home::1 tariff for something like £10/month extra.
DeleteI suggested this to my father a while back as he can only get a very poor speed too. However as he objects to paying anything at all for his internet and thinks that even the cheapest providers are ripping him off the suggestion didn't get very far.
ReplyDeleteThere have been multiple occasions where a BE customer has upgraded to bonding and then found that they didn't "double their speed"..
ReplyDeleteCrosstalk caused by the second service being activated reduces the speed on the first line or the two lines have vastly different performance.
Your company probably have more energy to fight these kinds of problems - but it often isn't simply a "doubling of speeds" :(
Well, we are not trying to do anything clever on the lines, just two broadband lines, and getting the speed that is the total of the two. I think Be did an ADSL level bonding thing, which may be different (and should be better in theory). Obviously, technically, the new line may not sync quite as fast, so "double" is not quite the case - but it could just as easily be faster and hence more than double. Putting in newer modems can often increase speeds of both lines.
DeleteThe BE solution is G998.1 Based if I Remember correctly.
ReplyDeleteCrosstalk can be a problem particularly if there's a section of cable that for whatever reason is not made up of twisted pairs as can happen more often than you'd think in a block of flats/apartments.
I Used to Sync between 18 - 22Mbit/s (Depended on SNR profile and if AnnexM was on or off) but when I first got a second line activated it dropped to something like 12Mbit/s on one line and 6Mbit/s on the other and Both lines were hugely unstable.
I traced it to some internal wiring that had been run using a horrible flat 2 pair extension cable, removed that cable and the speed shot back up to what it should be. Ideally of course I'd have plugged in at the master socket but it wasn't possible at the time due to a lack of power in that location.
I was at least lucky enough in that I was able to relocate my modems to somewhere where I didn't need to send the DSL signal down that crappy cable (It was buried under the floor so not simple to re-run) but others are not so lucky.
I did exactly this. The second line was for some reason not managing quite the same sync rate as the first. (The first was exceptionally good given that the line is around four miles long -61dB) But I was so pleased with the 2 + 1.75 Mbps result that I went and ordered a _third_ line, so we now get a measured 6.1 Mbps download speed on a really good day (when the Internet is v quiet.)
ReplyDeleteDoubled - Pah!
ReplyDeleteYou QUADRUPLED mine!
good one
ReplyDelete