Broadband &a load balancer

[ful56_uk]

Evening all,

 

BT are offering us 2x 100mb lines with a load balancer or 1x 200mb lines. What would be the benefit of having a load balancer?

 

 

Thanks

[Norphy]

Redundancy I suppose. If one of your 100mb lines went down, you'd still have some connectivity.

[FN-GM]

Well the load balancing allows you to load balance between 2 lines, use them both at the same time. If one line fails the connection will continue to function.

[Chris_]

But then if BT are providing the 2 lines over the same fibre, through the same ducts, back to the same exchange then there won't really be any redundancy benefit. Probably cheaper to go with the 1x 200mb line. BT have a pretty good SLA though so hopefully downtime would be kept to a minimum, even with a single connection.

[ful56_uk]

to be fair in the years we have had a leased line it has never gone down once.

[Sagima]

Get the 200mb line. the bt one almost never fails (although when it does it's usually because of a huge issue that would affect both your lines.)

[Wave9_Lee]

It's hard to say which option is best without knowing the price as well as the criticality of your service. 200Mbps will be over a 1Gb bearer, so there could well be a significant price difference. A 4-6 hour outage might be acceptable to some, not to others. 100Mbps and 1 or 2 FttC might be a good compromise.

[nicholab]

Pfsense can do this kind of thing.

[cpjitservices]

Pfsense can do this kind of thing.

 

Yes, yes it can. Have it working in several places. Pointless though as @Chris_ says same ducts, same exchange, same line.... better being a completely separate connection if you want proper redundancy.

[twin--turbo]

Although it's the case here that we can't easily go to another exchage it is more than possible to have diverse routing to different exchanges. It's how soon it splits after your building that counts.

 

If it is one exchange then the service should be split between different equipment racks so that a failuer of one rack does not affect both links.

 

The big question is how is traffic handled , are they in effect one connection that's split at your site and rejoined at the exchange( so presenting one IP to the outside world) , or two seperate independant services with their own IP.

 

TT

[CAWJames]

I have a room of BT routers(well not a room, but a small stack!) meant for failed load balancing/aggregating services or different projects that never worked(BGMP, Aggregated broadband, etc). I wouldn't personally trust a BT "solution", but their vanilla BTNet lines are very good, if a little expensive these days compared to other LL services from TalkTalk etc.

 

We have a BTNet 100MB that never goes down, but then again we have TT lines that are just as resilient(but then again, considering they also come in over BT fibre and use a BT NTE, its all the same anyway!!)

 

James