Our internet is painfully slow, but spending £600+ pm on a leased line isnt an option.

We were thinking of having 3 or 4 8meg adsl lines going into a 4 port wan with load balancing, has anyone done this or is it a stupid idea that will not work?

What do you mean a 4 port wan? You'd have to have several ADSL modems connected to the same network and a router configured to send traffic from various random sections of your office (presume this what it is) down various adapters.

Have you considered Business ADSL or SDSL? Still much cheaper than leased lines I think but you get better service.

Unless you can get the 3 or 4 lines bonded with something like MLPPP (which the provider would need to do for you – not sure if any providers offer this), I can't see how the loadsharing would work. i.e. how would the router know which of the 3 or 4 lines to send a particular packet down, and how would the provider know which line to send return traffic down. You could do something clever with NAT, but this would require PCs to be statically mapped to one of the 4 lines…

Also worth nearing in mind is that with MLPPP, becuase of the nature of broadband (running on ATM, which uses very small cells), if one cell gets corrupted, the whole packet has to be retransmitted. This can lead to goodput collapse – where the actual useful traffic you get through is very small.

I can't see how the loadsharing would work. i.e. how would the router know which of the 3 or 4 lines to send a particular packet down, and how would the provider know which line to send return traffic down

Could you not just set up different PCs on different subnets, and add routing rules to suit?

There's quite a few providers that will do bonded ADSL. Done properly, you end up with a router (eg Cisco 1800 series) that combines the individual ADSL lines so they are transparent to you. Obviously, you need to have all lines with a single ISP for this to work properly.

Alternatively, you can go for a router/firewall/UTM appliance that supports multiple WAN connections. The appliance can then load balance outgoing traffic across these links – you can't do much with incoming traffic. Benefit of this option is you can take ADSL from two (or more) different ISPs, so have a little protection should an ISP suffer an outage (though it doesn't usually help if a JCB goes through the cables coming into your building).

Could you not just set up different PCs on different subnets, and add routing rules to suit?

Yep, that would work – it's a variation of my NAT suggestion. Might be a pain having to split the LAN up into several VLANs and firewalling each of the connections. Would also need RIPE addressing on each LAN, or a firewall/router doing NAT on each DSL line.

Hmm cheers, yeah have looked at bonded adsl /sdsl too.

We are stuck with a BT 8meg line so ideally I wanted to still make use of it if possible. I have been asked to try and keep it under 250pm but it seems everything jumps to silly money with little increase in performance.

Will have another look at bonded options.

I R not network admin 🙂

Talk about re-inventing the wheel 😉

Buy a firewall that can handle multiple WAN connections – one that handles all the NAT, routing rules, load balancing, monitoring (it will stop using a link should it detect that the link is down) and the rest.

[hijack]

What cheap firewall for dialling into home?

[/hijack]

Buy a firewall that can handle multiple WAN connections

That was kind of what I was meaning.. sorry Im a web designer rather than network bod 😀

Have a look at the SonicWall TZ / NSA – maybe the TZ 210 and NSA 240 models.

I've no doubt other manufacturers can do the same but I know the SonicWall range well.

How many users have you got and what are they using the Internet for?

8 users, a creative design company print/digital so large files geting sent to and from ftp locations lots of web browsing and the like.

Without bonded ADSL I think you're onto a crapload (read don't even bother) of pain here. Is it just outbound access you're interested in? I presume you have an external POP handling your email?

As cxi says, if you can find a device that can handle load balancing across multiple WAN connections that would be your best bet outside of bonding. I can think of a couple of other methods but they're not worth the effort.

The best simple one I can think of would be to segment different areas of the office, say on a per room basis. Then each room router has a default route to a distinct ADSL router/firewall/whatever you want to use with their own 8Meg circuit, the routers would all be able to see each other and then specific internal routing could be set up between each of the rooms. This will only work if you have no inbound access though.

Did you look at business ADSL? Should be able to get that many users online without any fannying about I reckon.

I shall continue my search 🙂 Cheers for the replies all.

What cheap firewall for dialling into home?

Do you mean what firewall would you need at home? Most ADSL routers provide VPN termination, Netgear are good. If you're on a corporate network though you may struggle to get out, you'd need to find a device that provided an SSL VPN capability so you could pass through a proxy.

Sonicwall do one I think which provides everything, not had much experience with them.

Sounds to me like what you need there is a site licence for Winzip (-:

In seriousness, if I were the IT manager there I'd want to review workflow in the first instance, make sure there's nothing internal you can do and that the users aren't taking the proverbial (eg, torrenting movies all day whilst they all sit there streaming internet radio). Unless you live at Cape Wrath, eight users really shouldn't be flattening an 8mb ADSL connection. What speed is it actually connecting at?

Sending large files is always going to be relatively slow; that's what the 'A' bit in ADSL means, your outbound bandwidth is a fraction of the inbound speed by design.

Well myself and our programmer are "in charge" of the internet. No one takes the mick really but basically if people are downloading or uploading a a big file then it really impacts normal browsing for everyone else. I say 8meg but we get anywhere between 3-5.5 most of the time.

You know what its like it always crawls when you really need it etc.

Do you mean what firewall would you need at home? Most ADSL routers provide VPN termination, Netgear are good

I couldn't find one, but it was flippin hard to figure out – most of them said VPN support, but I got the impression that was VPN pass-through for connecting OUT to your office VPN…

I want to be able to connect in to my home network.

No one takes the mick really but basically if people are downloading or uploading a a big file

You can manage traffic can you not? Like impose a max bandwitdth on any one client?

It may be the uploads that are really killing you – The A in ADSL is for Asymmetric.

You could bond multiple ADSL lines using adsl modems and a windows or linux server, but it feels like a hack for something your work relies upon.
With a proper carrier connection you can get Quality of Service implemented to prioritise traffic properly, and a decent link in both directions.

A really simple (and by far the cheapest) approach would be to get another standard ADSL circuit and just use it for FTP and file transfers… and the other for email/browsing etc. Not the most elegant of solutions but it will help

You'll also need a bit of routing setup to automate this… although one of my customers just has a separate network that they connect to when they need to upload…like you they couldn't afford a fatter pipe… they also wrote some scripts to do the majority of their planned transfers overnight, although that might not help much if you need to transfer stuff straight away.

As mentioned above, becuase your uplink speed is much lower than your downlink speed, as soon as you start the transfer of a large file, then it'll trash the connection for everything else, but if you have a dedicated link for this sort of thing then it won't matter so much.

If your files are that big, then I'd expect you'll still get issues even with bonded circuits as you're still going to be able to easily saturate your uplink.

Basically though the issue is that you are trying to do something that ADSL is not really ideal for…(ie uploading lots rather than uploading little and downloading lots)

The cost of leased line (or equivalent) circuits are coming down too… see if you can get some quotes and you'll get an idea of what is available in your area.

Inverse multiplex?

Having looked around and relayed the facts to the boss we may well stretch the budget as it is fairy essential. Easynet do 8meg sdsl for 399pm so will have a look at that I think.

Thanks again for replies.

For a DIY solution some Draytek routers will load share (notice I didn't say balance) across a couple of ADSL connections.

http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor2820.html

What to watch out for with load sharing/balancing across multiple links is the method used to achieve it. If it's just routers at either end load sharing whilst you will end up with sum total bandwidth of the links used, EACH individual session will be limited to the maximum speed of the individual link it's routed over. So for example if you have a need for all the total bandwidth with one FTP session then this isn't the method for you and MLPPP would be a better choice, however if you have got lots of things going on at once then it will be OK.

One of the rules of the telecoms world is whatever bandwidth you put in it will all get used up pretty quickly and you well end up looking again at increasing bandwidth. So should you be using your existing bandwidth in a better manner, for example setting up some firewall rules to ban or limit streaming video etc..

Ps..forgot to add there are ISP's out there doing bonded DSL. But as well as the xDSL technologies it could be worth a look at ISP's doing EFM (Ethernet First Mile) Ethernet speed circuits delivered over multiple copper pairs as there could be options within your budget there too.