Why is buying connectivity always hard?

When we started Lijit we bought a DSL circuit from Qwest. It's a 7Mbit downstream / 900K upstream circuit. This is referred to as ASDL meaning Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line.

Local loop access refers to the copper that connects your house or business to the larger circuits out in the street in the front of your house. Local loop is almost always the limiting factor in delivering bandwidth anywhere. DSL is the latest way to cram more information down the jinky wires that connect your location to the world.

Now, because two copper wires stretched over a defined distance and shielded from one another have a theoretical bandwidth limitation (how fast a signal can change, or how much data can move across it in a finite period of time) ADSL was invented to give more of that maximum bandwidth to downstream traffic. Recognizing that a lot of internet surfing is data coming back to you in the form of web pages, images and video, it was designed to favor this direction. This works pretty well until you start to get a lot of people using the connection. Why? Because although most data does in fact come downstream, it's basically ALL interlocked with the data going upstream by the TCP/IP connectivity stack on your computer.

Example: Browser asks for giant image, web site sends a little bit, computer says send a little more, a little more is sent, repeat rinse, wait.

So fast forward to today. …

Lijit has about 27 employees all sharing this circuit and it totally sucks.. The reason (I'm fairly sure) is we are suffering the latency on the uplink. While the data going upstream is small relatively to the data coming downstream, the contention around the 900Kbit/second is limiting our ability to received data downstream. DirectWay internet service used to have a similar problem because your uplink went through a modem on a phone line and data came back to you via satellite.

So a month or so ago we started researching "what to buy to make it better". It seems the only option is a fractional DS3 (a DS3 circuit is a symmetric 45Mbit circuit).

Of thank god, lets light that up! What? It's $2,000 a month? Ahh, we pay like $80 a month now for 7Mbit downstream?

So this leads me to the question. Why doesn't someone offer the ability to buy two ADSL circuits together, oppositely configured so one is delivering 7Mbit down, the other 7Mbit up? Just plug them into a router and BAM 14Mbit of total bandwidth for like $160 a month? Ok, I'll even pay $500 a month how about that.

It would use two pair of wire but most houses have 4 pair by default let alone business that have even more ability.

Another idea, how about a router that just lets me plug-in 3 standard ADSL circuits through a smart NAT that just fans out employee's automatically between the circuits. For $2000 can buy a lot of ADSL circuits…

 

 

Comments

[cthrall]

A friend told me about TowerStream (http://www.towerstream.com). Could be worth looking into - 12Gb for $1299, don't have to deal with telcos and ISPs, etc. Not sure if Boulder has coverage yet.

I just moved into temporary space in downtown Boston. "We have three DS3s shared bandwidth." We were maxing out at 50kbs yesterday...takes a while to download stuff from MSDN at that speed. Maybe it's time to upgrade to a Window office so I can stick a WiMax antenna outside... :)

[Nick]

Check out SharedBand @ CES (www.sharedband.com). They seem to have a software/router combo that is cheap and does exactly what you want. I don't work for them, just saw the demo and was impressed...

[Tom Jordan]

As for your last idea, yeah, why not? Plug them all into a switch supporting vlan tagging, then run a linux box as a router (cheap) supporting tags, then spread the load. Why wouldn't you do that and stay cheap?
BTW - are you sure the uplink is your issue? 900 up should be fine up for 7 down, depending on your usage patterns. I'm assuming you've watched the net and you know uplink speed is your problem. People would still be using one adsl link or another, but at least it would be 27/3 per line, rather than all 27 on one. Heck, get them from different providers and you get redundancy in the deal, just keep your linux box up, but you could make that redundant as well.

[brad dupee]

try a peplink device: www.peplink.com

we use multiple circuits, T1's and DSL circuit on one for this reason.