[Wylug-discuss] Mulitilink PPP with ADSL on Linux

[Edward Chapman]

At the end of the day the firebrick with AA it is a very good alternative,
and definitely worth mentioning as it's a good option if one would rather
buy a router rather than have the hassle of configuring your own.

However, it is not true 'bonding' in the sense that mlppp is, it is round
robin style, per packet balancing, and suffers some drawbacks compared to
using mlppp:

1. You have to buy or rent the firebrick with the bonding feature token
which comes to £587 inc VAT according to
http://www.aaisp.net/aa/firebrick/.  You only have to buy the ADSL modems
with Nildram and MLPPP.

2. Why settle for clever load balancing of packets when you can have the
real thing with MLPPP.  Sending packets down different routes in the way
the firebrick does is not as efficient as having ppp itself fragment the
higher packets, send them over the available links, then reassemble them
in the correct order at the other end and send them on their way.
According to http://www.firebrick.co.uk/manuals/bonding.html with the
Firebrick in some situations the order of the packets is affected making
it not possile to achieve the full speed of the links combined.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3149 is a nice overview of
MLPPP and, I think, shows why it is superior in this case.

3. MLPPP is an open standard, which is why linux can speak mlppp with a
Cisco router.  When there is a choice, I prefer open standards.

I'm not trying to make a big deal out of this, but I think it needs to be
clarified that these two are not simply the same thing.

And anyway, I'm a Linux user, and prefer doing things the hard way :)

ric said:
> Yes two different ways of doing the same thing.  That page is a little
> misleading in its descriptions.   You can bond 4 lines into a max of
> 8mb/1mb its done at packet level using various networking tricks details
> on the site if you really need to know.
>
> They will also bond the lines at the headend if you ask them I dont
> know if they use MLPPP to do that.  This way does allow you to
> use the ISP's of your choice or technology.  They are very linux
> friendly so I thought it was worth sharing.
>
> ric
> brucenetworks.com