Difference between standard ADSL, uncontended DSL, and leased lines

Mort

Mort

Mort

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Milton Keynes
Hi all

Just wondering what the difference is between ADSL, uncontended DSL, and leased lines.

Reason being is at work we are on standard ADSL, and its rubbish. We are on 'up to 8mb' when in reality we are getting less than 1.5mb. Now as we are a design / web agency it is a total pain in the arse when deploying a site, or uploading grpahics to clients etc.

Was looking to try and get a better service, but as I only really have experience with home cable / ADSL connections what would my best bet be?

We are right out in the sticks in a converted barn, and the village which we reside is basically a road with said farm, a pub, and a handful of houses. Pretty much sure on our current connection we share the pipe with all the other businesses in the courtyard, plus all the home users of the village too.

Now I know leased lines are very expensive, and that would only be for a 2mb line which isnt that much greater than we have now (except the upload difference). But am I right in saying an uncontended DSL line is basically middle ground?

Would be looking at between 4mb - as high as we can get speeds. We dont really want to pay leased line prices, but we cant carry on as we are.

Any ideas? Cheers :cool:
 
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If you're conducting business on the line I think from a legal standpoint you should at least be using a business ADSL package.

A leased line is effectively a point to point from you to your ISP and can be incredibly expensive. You'll struggle to get a quote without getting on the phone.

Uncontended DSL would be better yes, but what about SDSL or something?

From what I can tell your issue is upload speed, ADSL is unbalanced, you want something with a higher upload speed.
 
Mort said:
We are right out in the sticks in a converted barn, and the village which we reside is basically a road with said farm, a pub, and a handful of houses.
Click to expand...

Hence why your're only getting 1.5mbps on an 'up to' 8mpbs line. If you look at the charts of attenuation (~ line length) vs speed attained you need to be within 1km of the exchange to get the full advertised 8mpbs sync speed (and even then you'll only get 7.15 mpbs due to ATM overheads on each packet). Go onto samknows website and see how far you are away from your "local" exchange (and if it's listed as congested). Also, post your modem stats here, attenuation, s/n margin and sync speed would be the most relevant. Your idea about sharing the line with the other people in the courtyard is wrong, a simplistic view of ADSL contention is that it only really occurs at the BT centrals which IIRC are all down at Linx/telehouse. Local congestion can occur at your exchange (the backhaul between the exchange and the centrals, otherwise known as Colossus) but if samknows says it's green then the problem is probably one of line length and not centention. Would also help to know what ADSL provider you're with.

Your best bet without spending the earth would be to get a few BT lines in and then do bonded ADSL, this is where you have a clever router that splits the traffic over 2 ADSL connections.
 
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Uncontended DSL will get you very little benefit, there's so little contention on DSL anyway. Max premium will get you faster upload speed and priority through the BT ATM backbone so is worth a shot I'd say.

Other than that either stump up the cash for a leased line (from what you're saying it'll be huge, a fibre circuit from the nearest ISP POP will be charged per mile for installation)
 
The traffic light system for exchange congestion isn't that useful - green just means that the connection between the exchange and the rest of the BTw network is working within spec, not that you won't see congestion.

The first thing you need to work out is why you're only getting 1.5Mbps - if you're miles from the exchange, it's probably got nothing to do with contention.
 
yo thanks for all the posts / advice

turns out we are 15km from the nearest exchange, which pretty much rules out everything except a leased line. the downer being we have to sign up to a 3 year contract, and what with the upcoming recession thats about £22k worth of contract

For a years leased line we could pretty much cover the costs of moving to a more suitable location (not including buying the property of course) which we have been considering anyways, and if that was the case we wouldnt even need a leased line.

guess its a case of wait and see =/ bloody annoying tbh
 
As Toilen asid, first work out why you are getting poor performance and try to optimize it as much as possible (Router connected to master socket, if you have other devices make sure they're filtered, etc).

Once you've got the most possible out of it, I'd suggest you get an extra DSL line. They are pretty cheap and you could dedicate that to your file transfers leaving the other one for web, email, etc.

Bonding could be a solution but it can be problematic and (Having worked developing the product for an ISP that sells it) I would avoid it if you can.
 
Leased lines is definitely "where it is at" but as you said it can be expensive.
The actual monthly rent on a 2mb leased connection isn't too bad - however the installation cost will not be cheap especially as you're so far away from anywhere.

We currently have a 100mb fibre connection to our ISP, we are tiered to a 20mb/20mb connection and we're paying around £2300 per month for this.
The installation for this wasn't too bad, however before we moved to the 100mb fibre connection we were on an old 8mb leased connection and we paid many thousands to have that installed as they need to dig up along side the road, close roads off etc.
 
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