A few months ago we started out on a path to upgrade our DSL connection from 3mbit to 8mbit, and to upgrade providers from AT&T - flaky with no guarantee - to Speakeasy, who provides a 99% uptime guarantee and charges no extra for a business account with static IP addresses.  The process was long and painful, but we knew it would pay off, and when Covad came to install the line and modem for us, we had a great dissappointment: Speakeasy could only offer the same speed, at an increased price - not so great.

I decided to keep the more expensive line, due to the Service-Level Agreement, and Speakeasy's long-running reputation for being able to run a good network, but we had some bumps in the road, and lost connectivity a few days at a time during the first month, which was not much fun or very convenient at all.  Of course, it always died in the middle of someone doing something critically important, but when is that not happening?

Unfortunately, when AT&T and Covad collaborated to set up our new line, which up to the edge of the building still is managed by AT&T, they disconnected the AT&T DSL line, which we were still being charged for, and AT&T gave us a bunch of runaround about wanting to charge for a jack install, even after I upgraded to a service level that included additional jack installs.  This was important, however, because in order to increase our overall bandwidth, we really need to have more than one line - we are just too far from the telco CO - or Central switching Office - to get the advertised 8-15mbit rates from speakeasy, or anyone.

Another challenge we face is that there is a great deal of convenience in some cases gained by having a static IP address, at least if you are a system administrator like myself, because you can reduce the number of systems that allow unfettered public access, so I didn't want to just balance all traffic across the two connections, and the truth is that most of the time, 3mbit was OK for e-mail, web surfing, chat, and secure shell - the major things that we care about.  Unfortunately, when people try to use file sharing applications, esp tools like BitTorrent which are handy for downloading GNU/Linux install CDs and other big files with wide public appeal, it can really bog everyone else down.

There was never a practical way for us to manage this, because for everyone to set a personal bandwidth limit that allow us to simultaneously download at reasonable rates, and still surf, a single downloader - the most common case - would get very poor performance.  For months, we've really just changed our browsing habits a bit to make up for this, and it has been very inconvenient sometimes.  I often have to wait for everyone to leave the house if I want an exceptionally large file, or set up a download overnight, which wastes power.

So, we have a great solution, it's relatively cheap, and by virtue of separate connections, a global bandwidth limit on downloads is implemented.  I can get many of these same behaviours, and even more flexible bandwidth limiting, using the same tools, but for now I'm pretty pleased.

More to come..

[UPDATE] AT&T tried to gouge me for their mixup in all of this, my roommate never contributed as promised, and my router with working configuration crashed before I got the chance to write a howto, so I'm having trouble bringing this back up, but it was a fun experiment - maybe I can revive it later on for an Honors project in a networking course.