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On Sat, 22 Oct 2011, James Kilty wrote:
On 22/10/11 10:23, Gordon Henderson wrote:So go out and rent a DVD. Or get a 2nd line and load balance it. Renting DVDs is probably much much cheaper.We seem to buy a lot as we watch more than once. Interesting we have 2 lines. One is for Sharon's work, used for phone. The Internet connection is paid for by her work and comes down the original home line. However, redundancy may just be on the horizon - charities are also suffering in these hard times, perhaps more? So using these 2 lines might be risky.BTW sometimes my router shows a down speed of 3.7Mb/s. It's 3104000 at the moment.
The actual speed will be fixed to something slightly lower at the exchange - the bRAS profile (assuming a BT Wholesale line) so ask the ISP what the current profile cap is unless they provide a control panel to see it.
To use both lines you'll need a smart router that can do load balancing - it's not channel bonding so no single session will get more than one lines worth of speed, but it can help - work permitting :)
(or do it in Linux with a box with 3 Ethernet ports - see http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html )
Weren't you due to get FTTC though? There are providers other than Demon who'll do you an FTTC connection - BT for example and any one of their dozen or so resellers supporting FTTC. (Which I don't think Demon is yet) The down-side is losing the demon.co.uk email and website address - but personally I think that no-one ought to be tied to their connectivity provider for email and webspace, but maybe that's just me. You can get independant for very cheap these days - certianly under £25 a year. A couple of quid a month isn't a lot for your own domain, email and small web presence.
I think the ISPs are still currently tied into one-year contracts with FTTC via BT, so they're typically setting the entry level a bit higher than other ADSL connections. (e.g. Entanet entry level home has a 30GB cap @ £25.89 inc vat a month)
The cheapest is arguably BT themselves who are offering various bundles, but the first thing to do is de-couple your email/web from your connectivity.
Gordon
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