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BT Infinity Bonding

luna_s
Member

I work in the IT department in a school, we had slow business broadband and looked to upgrade.

The salesman sold us an extra FTCC infinity line and would upgrade our existing line to infinity, he told us

we could bond them (But didn't say how).

Anyway the lines are in, and got a new shiny pfsense box but the bonding just isn't working, everything appears to be setup correctly but in the PPP logs i'm seeing

"Can't join bundle wan without multilink negotiated."

 

What settings do I need to enable bundling ? eg MTU/MRU/MRRU ? Do BT actually offer bunding and if not were we sold a dud? I notice that the link that used to mention bundling is dead now ( http://www.businessdirect.bt.com/services/voice-and-data-connectivity-solutions/data/sharedband--bon... ) and I can't find any references to it anymore!

 

 

 

 

 

 

9 REPLIES 9

MHC
Guru

 

 

Do you actually want a bonded service?     A fully bonded service ties both lines together and at an extreme will allow one use to use all of teh bandwidth for large downloads.   It also requires hardware at teh exchange.

 

Load balancing however, is a way to spread your requiremnts between two or more lines and teh interface will manage teh resource requirements pushing various requests out onto different lines and routing te incoming data appropriately.

 

For a school I would have thought that load balancing is what you actually require and from memory pfSense provides it.

 

I can't help with your settings but why not contact either the salesman or Tech support.

 

 

luna_s
Member

Well to be honest the salesman told us to google how to do it, and the engineer told us to go to argos for a router, but thats not important 🙂 

 

Its the speed thats important, schools moved to cloud based MIS, plus now a lot of BYOD - sharing a 20Mbit line was getting silly and this was the cheapest and only feasible option but doesn't seem to work as advertised - seems like we were just sold an extra line for a sale ? Or does BT Infinity support MLPPP regardless (or like you said we need to get it "activated" something we weren't told about.?)

MHC
Guru

 

 

In my opinion it is the total bandwidth that is important and not the ability to gain te maximum for 1 machine.    I have 20 years experience as a school governor where I did a lot of advisory work on the IT solutions and trying to get teh best for teh school - but not always succeeding (see bleow*).

 

If there are lots of machines connecting, each of those requires a little of teh bandwidth and to the machine it does not matter which line it uses provided it sees a reasonable response.     If there is a high priority job running and you have bonding then almost alll resources could be diverted to that machine creating annoyance with other users however with Load Balancing, if one machine is hooging all of teh bandwidth on one connection then all other users will be routed through te second connection - balancing teh load and giving them a reasonable service.

 

 

* LA IT services.      The local authority took over IT provision to schools.   The implemented a horrendous firewall and blacklisted site policy which included ALL webmail.    We had several overseas teachers, all fairly young and IT literate, who wanted to keep in touch with their families at home but because of te blanket ban could not access email during their breaks.     Would teh LA change policy?   NO and they could not justify it either, just one incompetent persons decision.   Would granting staff email access from 12:00 to 13:00 and 16:00 to 08:00 cause any problems - of course not.      Just one example of many.

luna_s
Member

We aren't under the LEA, we manage our own internet and filtering 🙂 (Which is also horrendous ;p)

but has different restrictions depending on what security group you fall under so it's not all bad.

 

Load balancing has its fair share of problems so I don't want to go down that route (Secure connections etc), bonded = more bandwidth so in my head the quicker you get what you want, the less time you spend using bandwidth, it's not necessarily just for downloading - biggest thing is teachers using youtube(!) in their lesson plans.. Just a shame we can't get better speeds especially considering I personally have 100Mbit at home..

 

Still going OT so, is bonding an extra charge or is it an always on thing? Just trying to get to the bottom of if it's our equipment or BT's end, remember we received absolutely no intructions or if its an extra charge and also what settings should we be using, surely there must be someone out there that uses pfsense with infinity we can't be the only one?

MHC
Guru

 

 

Bonding does not give more bandwidth than Load Balancing - in fact it probably gives slightly less beacuase of additional overheads to manage the bonding.

 

 

luna_s
Member

I understand that, but it's better than what we have currently, i'd rather have a super fast leased line, but we can't have everything! Our budget it very limited and people want the earth for nothing so have to make do.

DaveA
BT Partner
BT Partner

Hi.

 

Try this lot:

 

http://sharedband.com/

 

I believe they started as part of a BTLB and became their own company, although I can't be 100% sure on that.

 

Dave

luna_s
Member

Thanks, I saw that site and wondered.

I never had much input on the original purchase, and i bet the salesman said something like, buy a line now and you can bond them later.

 

 

devdefence
Member

We've recently upgraded our business bonded ADSL service to bonded FTTC which in reality is bonded infinity lines.

The company we use is Evolving Networks.  I'm sure they would give you a quote.  Really good support, and we've been with them now for years.

www.evolving-networks.co.uk/bonded-infinity is the specific page.