Bonding 4 dsl lines?

[bigalka]

Currently, I have bonded 2 dsl lines bonded together, 2 mb each line (that sucks, i know), 4 mb total. I have contacted my isp and asked them if i could bond 4 dsl lines and they said the telephone exchange at the moment only allows for 2 lines maximum for bonding. My question is why is it not possible to bond more than 2 lines at my telephone exchange? what are the requirements for bonding more than 2 lines? maybe i can contact the telephone exchange and convince them to offer me 4 lines bonding.

since there is no fiber optics here where i live and it will take a long time until it gets installed, I would like to get atleast 8 mb internet.

 

[bill001g]

It depends on the hardware they have in the central office. Very technically they could place the same box they use at your house at the main office but they choose not to. The central office equipment though is not a bunch of individual units stacked up in some big pile. The unit is called a dslam and is likely some massive room sized device with lots and lots of interface cards in it. If it was as simple as putting a 4 port card into a slot they would likely offer it. What tends to happen is to support a card it mean you need to upgrade the "slot" it plugs into which means you need to upgrade the chassis.

I suspect they never designed the equipment to support what you want and to increase it they would have to make a major upgrade. They know they can't realistically ask you to pay to replace their whole dslam so they just say it can't be done.....of course it CAN be done if you have unlimited money.

I would look at different technology. The ISP should be able to offer you 2m E1 lines over the same copper pairs you have. These tend to be a little more common to bond and simpler so they likely would offer you a 4xe1 solution.

 

[Solandri]

Currently, I have bonded 2 dsl lines bonded together, 2 mb each line (that sucks, i know), 4 mb total. I have contacted my isp and asked them if i could bond 4 dsl lines and they said the telephone exchange at the moment only allows for 2 lines maximum for bonding. My question is why is it not possible to bond more than 2 lines at my telephone exchange? what are the requirements for bonding more than 2 lines?

For bonding at the ISP level, it's limited by the equipment they have available. A card on your end splits your traffic along two DSL lines. At the ISP, an identical card combines the two traffic streams back into one. Depending on what equipment they're using, there may be a 2-line limit imposed by the manufacturer. (It's always possible they're lying to you and they can do more than 2 lines, but why would they turn away your money if they could actually do it?)

It is possible to bond lines without the ISP having to get involved. Basically you plug all 4 DSL lines into a single computer at your end. That computer runs MLPPP over 4 VPN connections, one per DSL line, to a single VPS you're renting. The VPS re-combines the packets carried over the VPNs into a single network connection.

I looked into this since I'm in a similar situation as you and Verizon only offers 1.5 Mbps DSL. But I deemed it too risky to try. A VPN adds overhead, and I wasn't able to determine how much overhead. Verizon tries to put everyone on 3 year contracts here, and I didn't want to be saddled with 4 DSL lines for 3 years + a VPS subscription which only provided as much speed as 2 DSL lines.