Need fast connection but far from nearest exchange

nero120

nero120

nero120

Soldato
Joined
12 Jan 2004
Posts
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Location
Londinium
Hey guys,

just moved house and need to sort out internet. It has to be fast as I need to log in to the work vpn and use remote desktop quite often, so looking for at least 16mb+. Trouble is, we are about 2km from the nearest exchange and BT reckons the most we can expect over their lines is 4.5mb :(

So what about the alternatives? Does sky use BT infrastructure for internet or does it come down the sattelite? Virgin internet comes through their own cable right?

Any advice on what options would get the fastest connection would be much appreciated!
 
Your only option is to get cable with Virgin Media as any other service will be using your phone line which obviously has a high attenuation.
 
Virgin Media, or lease line. How deep are your pockets? :-\

Before you jump on Virgin Media because they look like a good deal, do some reading around to get the full background in what you could be potentially letting yourself in for.

http://www.cm-forums.co.uk is a good start.
 
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How do service providers provide residential customers with fibre requested leased lines? I dont think they would dig up the roads just to install 1 fibre line to 1 individual premisis, or would they?
 
randal24 said:
Virgin Media, or lease line. How deep are your pockets? :-\

Before you jump on Virgin Media because they look like a good deal, do some reading around to get the full background in what you could be potentially letting yourself in for.

http://www.cm-forums.co.uk is a good start.
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Well I just checked and unfortuantely virgin haven't cabled our area yet! I'm in bloody london for gods sake! Anyways, through BT line we can expect 7mb/s which really isn't fast enough.

How much would you expect to pay for a lease line?
 
The most you'd get with an ideal line with BT is 8128kbps (which translates to 7.2Mbps of useful throughput) - to have a chance of getting any more, you'd need to look at the LLUers (Sky, Be, Bulldog et al).

The price of a leased line varies with your distance from the provider's Point of Presence, but you could probably expect an installation fee in the four figures.
 
tolien said:
The most you'd get with an ideal line with BT is 8128kbps (which translates to 7.2Mbps of useful throughput) - to have a chance of getting any more, you'd need to look at the LLUers (Sky, Be, Bulldog et al).

The price of a leased line varies with your distance from the provider's Point of Presence, but you could probably expect an installation fee in the four figures.
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Yikes! My pockets aren't that deep!

I phoned up Be and they quoted the most we could get as 7 so I guess that's it then. Damn it!
 
There was a little sarcasm around the whole leased line idea. It's pricey, you're talking thousands - so probably not viable for the odd VPN into work and some downloading. 7mb/sec is more than reasonable for what you want it for. If you're paying for an 8mb line that's a result in itself - a lot of people pay for faster subscriptions and get less. Personally, I'd go for that.

bobby_valentino said:
How do service providers provide residential customers with fibre requested leased lines? I dont think they would dig up the roads just to install 1 fibre line to 1 individual premisis, or would they?
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Depends on who owns the closest fibre run/exchange break out etc.. but if it falls into place then there's no reason why you can't have a fibre link at a residential premises.
 
Be are extremely conservative with their estimates, so it's highly probable you'd get more - I'd have thought the upstream would be a bigger concern with VPN though...
 
randal24 said:
Virgin Media, or lease line. How deep are your pockets? :-\

Before you jump on Virgin Media because they look like a good deal, do some reading around to get the full background in what you could be potentially letting yourself in for.

http://www.cm-forums.co.uk is a good start.
Click to expand...

if your choising virgin media with the intension of downloads large ammout for a given lengh of time id suggestion you read this before going with them for your connection http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
 
nero120 said:
Yikes! My pockets aren't that deep!

I phoned up Be and they quoted the most we could get as 7 so I guess that's it then. Damn it!
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If you need it for work, you should be leaning on your manager for a gratis connection, its a bit unreasonable to expect staff to subsidise the business:eek:
 
morfmedia said:
You don't need much bandwidth for VPN / Remote desktop, you'd be amazed how efficient Microsoft have made it!
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Indeed, you don't need anywhere near 16Mbps for a RDP or other remote desktop type session. I support a site in London which has all it's Internet traffic routed over a VPN to Sydney and LogMeIn Rescue works quite nicely (the site in London has a 2Mbps DSL tail).
 
morfmedia said:
You don't need much bandwidth for VPN / Remote desktop, you'd be amazed how efficient Microsoft have made it!
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I work from home, have been for the past 2 months on the back of a 512k adsl line. however even with this 512/256 connection I had no problems using my VPN connection into work then jumping out via RDP to up to 5 servers at the same time. Although the speed wasn't great, it worked and allowed me to do enough overtime to double my salary this month :D

I've now moved and have access to an 8mb adsl line and it's amazing how fast it is compared to the old 512kb!
 
tolien said:
The most you'd get with an ideal line with BT is 8128kbps (which translates to 7.2Mbps of useful throughput) - to have a chance of getting any more, you'd need to look at the LLUers (Sky, Be, Bulldog et al).

The price of a leased line varies with your distance from the provider's Point of Presence, but you could probably expect an installation fee in the four figures.
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You'd be lucky to get it that low outside of a major city, We've had 4 BT 100MB circuits delivered in the last month or so and the lowest installation charge was £9500.

I'd look at SDSL for a decent speed work connection, sure the bandwdith isn't that great but uncontended and decent uplink makes a difference...

Or find an ISP which supports multilink PPP to bond ADSLs together.
 
bigredshark said:
I'd look at SDSL for a decent speed work connection, sure the bandwdith isn't that great but uncontended and decent uplink makes a difference...
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SDSL isn't necessarily uncontended, you can find ISPs offering 1:1 SDSL but the standard SDSL services use the same Centrals as the ADSL traffic once they hit the ISPs network.

Uncontended 1:1 SDSL is effectively a leased line.
 
Teal said:
SDSL isn't necessarily uncontended, you can find ISPs offering 1:1 SDSL but the standard SDSL services use the same Centrals as the ADSL traffic once they hit the ISPs network.

Uncontended 1:1 SDSL is effectively a leased line.
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Sorry, what I meant wasn't actually SDSL, I more specifically meant datastream SDSL. All the SDSLs we provide are datastream though and never touch a BT central, straight in on an ATM pipe to our network. You could even look at datastream ADSL max, that would likely suit your needs pretty well.

You'll need to find an ISP who's prepared to sell it to you though, we do it for our customers but we don't deal with individual users. I suspect not too many people do datastream ADSL Max at the moment...

Also, it's not strictly a leased line in my view, it still touches BTs ATM network, uses the dslams etc. It's less resilient then either an E1 or a fibre circuit.

EDIT: Also, datastream isn't necessarily uncontended, it's whatever contention the provider asks BT for when they order it...
 
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