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We're a webdev company that has outgrown its ADSL bandwidth. It's currently 4/1 Mbit/s and due to distance we can't simply get faster DSL, whether ADSL or SDSL. Stacking multiple DSL connections is prohibitively expensive, and so is laying fiber due to us moving to another location in a year or so.

After shopping around it seems that Ethernet-over-Copper is our best bet. They will use several copper pairs and provide a 2/2 Mbit/s connection with a provider-independent IP range.

Since we need more downstream bandwidth than 2 Mbit/s, we would like to complement this with our current ADSL connection, which is with another ISP. We have a fixed IP from them.

In effect there would be two WAN connections, Ethernet (layer 2) and ADSL (layer 3), that would need to be aggregated into a single pipe.

Is this possible?

Do we need to somehow define rules based on traffic type or QoS somehow, or perhaps auto-balance based on load or connection-cost?

What kind of hardware do we need? We're willing to buy some Cisco or Juniper device since we don't currently have anything useful.

Any tips will be helpful since this is new territory for us.

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why is bonded ADSL so expensive? In the UK there are numerous ISPs that'll offer bonded ADSL for just the cost of X * DSL lines. – Alnitak Dec 14 '09 at 14:13
presumably because he doesn't have spare additional phone lines so those actual wires would need running? – Chopper3 Dec 14 '09 at 15:49
We do have unused wires, but we'd need about 4 pairs of 1/1 Mbit for any decent total speed. Several ISP's quoted us a setup cost of €5000+. Most of it for the router. The rest for connecting the lines. The monthly fee was steep too. Not an attractive option for an SMB company. – Martijn Heemels Dec 15 '09 at 22:36
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4 Answers

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You almost certainly can't combine the two lines in the way you probably want, where a request goes out one pipe/ISP and comes back in the other. The issue is your current ISP would need to be able to route your new IP block and that is highly unlikely.

What will probably be a better solution is to break requests out into services on different pipes or segment traffic based on IP. So you may send all web traffic to one pipe and all ftp traffic to another. That is actually not too hard to do with a CISCO router or any number of open source firewalls like Shorewall.

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I see. Segmenting services will suit us fine. Is there no problem with the fact that one link is ADSL and the other is ethernet, due to different layers? – Martijn Heemels Dec 14 '09 at 15:00
I believe you will be fine because whatever does the traffic shaping will do it at the same layer for both paths. – carson Dec 14 '09 at 18:30
Good point. Thanks for the commentary. – Martijn Heemels Dec 15 '09 at 22:38
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up vote 0 down vote

Take a look at devices from: XRoads Network; mushroomnetworks or peplink

Cheers,

Philip

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up vote 0 down vote

Why not use a small load balancer. Some of thse devices are avaialbe for as low as $2000.

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Check out Elfiq - they are smoking hot, never had a problem with mine if fact it saved my skin a few times!

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