Late notice, but there’s an $249 early bird special (code: TDDIRVIP) for tech days that ends July 1. The Toronto event takes place on September 29-30 at Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
I always find events like this a great opportunity to keep pace with Microsoft’s latest and greatest for developers. This years tracks are covered here.
One of the infrastructure upgrades we required was additional inbound bandwidth at the development office. Our T1 running at 1.5mbps no longer provided enough bandwidth, and despite being a T1 had more issues then it should over the 3 1/2 years we have had the service.
The development office is at the far south end of town next to the lake, which is quite a distance from the centrally located CO. It’s primarily industrial, I can watch the trains pickup the new Camaro’s from GM out my window. SDSL can’t make it this far from the CO, and the upstream bandwidth of an ADSL line wouldn’t be enough.
Fiber isn’t already in our building, and judging by the price I was quoted and the long term contract required, it’s not nearby either.
That’s when I found there’s way to “bond” multiple ADSL lines together using MLPPP. Basically you have 2 ADSL lines setup with MLPPP, and you get almost twice the speed. Your provider has to support the technology, because there is hardware on your end and their end that makes the MLPPP magic happen.
Teksavvy had many positive comments about them on the web so I went ahead and ordered 2 dry ADSL lines from them, 2 SpeedTouch 516 modems, and an well powered consumer router to run Tomato MLPPP on.
Here’s some speed tests I did when I first setup the line.
Single ASDL line:
Two ADSL lines using MLPPP:
After testing the line for a couple of weeks I cut the office over to the new line.
Pros:
- 3 times the download bandwidth, almost the same up we had before
- 60% cost savings per month vs. T1
Cons:
- No 4 hour SLA, if the lines go down might have to work from home (or all get rocket sticks).
I just plugged in a Rogers Mobile Internet stick into my laptop, the speed in the office is fantastic.
It’s much faster then the speed I get with my aging tethered Blackberry 8800.
