Decent Internet for work

Soldato
Joined
26 Jun 2011
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So at work we only get usual BT broadband.

Fibre is non existent with no future plans atm.

What options do I have?

Lease line is ridiculously expensive...What about these bonded lines I hear? Maybe 3g?

Download is 3.5 Mbps and Upload usually 0.80 today it was 0.20 :/
 
Yeah, unlucky. One of my clients is in the same position.

You can get 10/10 EFM for under £300 in most places, so that would be my first choice. Bonded ADSL will cost you roughly the same once you've bonded 3 or 4 lines, except it will be worse in every way.

4G could be an option, but you need to know if a data cap is going to work for you or not. You also can't have a static IP on a 4G connection yet as I think they all use some form of NAT.
 
Ok, what on earth was that 10/10 EFM thing! Break it down like you're talking to a child, I'm pretty crap at this stuff.

The leased line thing is about £350 P/M.

Bonding 3 lines is like £60 P/m..
 
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What speed is that £350/month leased line? Doesn't sound too bad for pricing and remember, no contention.

We pay £2k/month. It's a 200mb leased line of a GB barer - but we're not in the centre of town so costs are a little higher.
Leased line prices have dropped considerably since the 1mb one we had many years ago (which cost then almost what our current connection costs)
 
We have been quoted around £600/Month for 10mbit on 100mbit bearer.

EFM was an option but there are apparently contractual issues if you want to change part way through whereas it is just a phonecall and agreement on price change for leased line they say.
 
You can do a B-End shift on a proper fibre circuit, as well as being able to upgrade your 10 on 100 to 20 for example. To upgrade an EFM is a cease and reprovide with no guarantee that you can actually get any more speed out of it.

Fusion quoted me £381 for 20 on 100 with no install charges (3 year term), might be worth having a look?
 
That's a charge on top of your line rental and ADSL connection charges.

To use the service you will need the following:

Two or more Broadband connections capable of accessing the Internet

http://www.sharedband.com/solutions/requirements-useful-information/

Edit: So you're looking at £60/month for sharedband, £90/month for 3x unmetered connections, £45 for 3x line rental agreements. Which isn't far off a low end EFM product for a bit of a hack with no SLA.
 
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Hmm... Spoke to Fusion and they are £160 cheaper per month than the previous best quote for 10/100
 
Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't the ADSL option 'up to'? It looks like you've got a poor line for your existing ADSL line, so won't the bonded lines be poor as well?
 
Yeah, but you get (poor number) multiplied by however many you bond. Very roughly, ignoring bonding overheads etc.

It doesn't take long for a bonded solution to cost proper prices, at which point the proper solution is a million times better in every way.

Edit: With regards to EFM, although it bundles copper pairs into a single connection it's physically combined back to the POP. While the speed does vary with distance you can just add another pair to overcome this (up to 8), and the speeds are guaranteed and synchronous. Here's how it's delivered: http://helpdesk3.fmn.uk.net/news/how-is-efm-actually-delivered
 
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How did you get on pepsilol?

We're in a slightly similar situation at work, small office, slow internet etc.

There's no fibre or cable options on our postcode yet so investigated bonding. We're currently with BT and were sold two more phone-lines, it wasn't clearly explained to us at the time it was sold that a third party (Sharedband) would deliver the bonding part of the service. Complete with extra costs that weren't mentioned by BT.

Anyway. In my head I hoped the solution from them would be one magic box that plugged into the three phone lines and provided one EWAN link to our existing WIFI router. It's not, they propose to supply us with a router for each line, which we need to supply an ADSL modem for (so we need to buy two more modems). And then a switch + WIFI hub on the other side for each office user to connect to.

It feels like a PITA, and that seems to be the feelings here - it's a bodge to avoid the sometimes scary cost of going down a 'proper' solution to slow internet in a workplace environment. I look at our current setup (phone line into a router and a couple of wifi hubs on a shelf) and feel like it's a bit prehistoric to split it all out into a device for every role in the connection and then times that by three.

If for arguments sake we stick with Sharedband (current prices here) is there a single product that accepts three different phone lines and could reduce the number of devices to set this up?
 
We looked into Urban WiMax and got a quote in April - £499 ex.VAT a month for 10/10 SDSL. Bit much for us at the time.

Sharedband will be 2/3rds of these other solutions, so we're going ahead at least for the 14days trial seeing as we have the three phone lines ready to go.
 
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