A number of years ago a customer decided to upgrade their broadband connection because the business used new technology that required a number of office workers to have a reliable fast internet connection.
It was at this time they decided to go with a bonded broadband solution purely on the grounds of cost as fibre was and still is extremely expensive. Also this solution provided some failover as the system would still operate even with three of the fours lines down.
We placed the order and BT tell us we can expect speeds of up to 4mb on each of the 4 lines giving a potential bandwidth of 16mb. Now I know this was unlikely, but hey ho lets see what happens.
BT arrive on site and install the four lines, the Cisco router with 4 ADSL WICS is supplied and connected, but you’ve guessed it the speed was appalling.
I monitor the speeds over a period of weeks and one line is particularly poor. It regularly sync’d between 800kbps and 1.5mbps. The other three hover around 3.5 to 4.5mbps.
Now for those that may not understand the bonding technology, this means that all lines must effectively sync at the lowest common denominator, so we now have 4 x 800kbps at its worst. So we have a 2 grand Cisco router 4 brand new ADSL lines and speed equal to about 3.2mbps. Wow the excitement.
I call the service provider and explain the situation. OK they say (To be honest they have been very helpful so my gripe it not with them), maybe there is excessive noise on the internal cabling. The ADSL lines where about 50 metres from the DP.
We agree to move the ADSL sockets downstairs right next to the DP thus removing the cable factor. Back come BT and duly oblige by moving the lines as discussed. Guess what, it did not make a blind bit of difference.
So now on a bad day by removing the slowest line from the bonding I can actually get a better average speed across the connection as the slowest speed is higher.
It never ceases to amaze me that in this day and age, BT are totally incapable of providing rock steady fast links running at the same speed, fed from the same street box to the same exchange. Why are we still having to put up with third world speeds and quality of service in this country.
