Zen Internet Support Forum

cyteck:

I would be extremely suprised if BT had only 11 RAS in the entire UK I doubt that personally but I'm willing to be proved wrong of course if you know better.

 From http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/equip2.htm:

There are currently 11 RAS's that serve all the various local exchanges:-
Birmingham, Bletchley, Ealing, Edinburgh, Ilford, Kingston, Manchester, Reading, Sheffield, Milton Keynes, Faraday.

The number may have grown slightly, but it is not as high as you may think.

*) I agree that if you don't ask you don't get so it is worth asking, unfortunately I do not find the broadband market as flexible as say the mobile phone market where you can encourage all sorts of deals out of a company if you use the right words/threats

*) I see no reason why a residential customer could not have both a BT ADSL line and a cable conenction at the same time for the same cost as if they had them at seperate premises. The cable provider will likely need to install cabling (unless it has been previously used in that premises) but this would just be a normal install. On from that, the cable company does not care if you are using the BT line to the house or not, the medium is different, including the termination into the building. It is of no concern to the cable company. (I hope that made sense). 

EDIT: My friend has just told me he uses both at his home. The ADSL connection is a free work connection with a low usage cap and he uses the cable for anything not work-related. He just ordered both as normal does not have to pay a premium. 

Hi Again,

OK!! I'm VERY surpised to learn there ARE only 11 RAS servers, I have to say thats totally amazing too given the sheer volume of traffic. **You learn some thing new every day interesting!!

**YES! thats true the broadband market is still quite ridgid but I think thats more too do with history and the way the government set things up i.e. BT monopoly or should that be monolith? Its getting better but its only doing so quite slowly though.

**I had thought the reason you couldn't have both BT & Cable broadband into one property was due to the telecoms companies themselves & the proprietary nature of the service & issues of competition but seems thats a myth too. OK! I'm pleased to be proved otherwise I'll remember that one. I though if you had BT then you couldn't have cable as well at the same time, obviously not the case then.

**Most people wont want or need both due to cost alone (unless paid for by your employer of course).

Ivan

Just to put my two penneth in

If you are looking to put in two ADSL lines whose copper exit your building at two different points and then head off a cable run to two different exchanges then for the cost and hassle IMHO you should go for a leased line as once this much planning is required for your connectivity then it becomes business critial and MD's can then usually find the money to fund this (its easy to offset agains the 'potentiol' downtime and lost revenue)

If your business can take the hit of downtime then you are pretty much laughing with the cheapness of ADSL (I usually find that in business's who have ADSL that people moan when they loose connectivity because its a hassle as apposed to a life or death situation).

In terms of redundancy, be it a 2nd ADSL line, Satallite etc, are you aware that you will be routing your traffic through a different IP,so any VPN's, MX tags etc you have set up won't work - you can always put a 2nd MX tag on your domain if need be with a low weighting so that it acts as a failover - also any VPN's to endpoints, you can move over to a certificate based authentication.

I ususally find that a 2nd ADSL is sufficient for most people's redundancy, unless the whole DSLAM is shot you tend to get away with it if one of your lines fails.  

If you want to have a backup which doesn't rely on BT have you thought about a 3g sim with a router, if you are in an area with HSDPA then the speeds aren't too bad nowadays.  You can get a sim only contract from Vodaphone, they have relaxed the download limits now (haven't got them to hand - but they use a FUP of 5gb - but if its only for a couple for a coupld of days may be fine?????).  You can get a Netgear router which these plug into (Netgear MBM621 I think).

If you do want to go satallite I know that the speeds are reasonable now but there is still a hight latency so if you have any time sensitive apps then you may get problems.  The last satalite solution I saw was BGAN - very impressed with it.  You purchase the kit and then you only pay for the data you download, so if you don't use it you don't pay for it (they may have changed that now).

Also, are you aware that Zen are looking into ADSL bonding (its not available yet but that may be an option for you in the future)

Good luck in your project

Gav