2 FTTP connections to one house

[JohnnyUK]

Hi All

I'm lucky enough to have BT's 900/110 FTTP service to my house.

The US company I work for are telling me I should get a second FTTP connection on a business tariff to get a better fix SLA.

I've previously had two broadband lines (non fibre) and have a load-balancing / failover router.

So, putting to one side whether it's good value for money, not required etc, will BT run a second length of fibre to my house?

The connection box under the pavement is about 20 feet away from the current fibre entry to my house.

Cheers

john

[rewild]

Yes, but it's pretty pointless in terms of diversity. The path the two fibres take will be identical, so subject to all the same points of failure. If one goes down, it's 99.999% likely that they both will.

Business or residential, Openretch SLAs are "best effort" anyway, so not a great thing to rely on. A proper diverse ethernet fibre circuit or two from a proper provider (who can actually plan the paths, lay new fibre where required, and guarantee they're as diverse as possible) will cost multiples of FTTP price.

Your most cost effective spend to improve uptime is probably a 4G/5G router as your second path.

[theboss]

If you get a second Openreach derived FTTP service you'll end up with a second port on the same piece of fibre. You might protect yourself from an ISP level outage by using another provider but an outage of any local infrastructure between your home and local exchange will render both lines unavailable simultaneously.

I would suggest if you have any alternative networks in the area such as CityFibre, Virgin Media, Gigaclear etc which aren't delivered on Openreach FTTP you'd be better off taking one of those to provide some diversity.

If the service level is really vital and the employer wants to pay for it you might also be able to get a 100Mbps leased line for a couple of hundred a month which is symmetric, uncontended and has much tighter SLA.

[JohnnyUK]

Thanks both

Oh indeed! I'm with you.

Entirely a waste of money / effort, but....ticks a box somewhere in California!

[bmwmike]

+1 for a 5g to provide some useful backup rather than a second fttp.

OP What are you paying for your fttp? Mines with BT, had it a few years now and the price has crept up to £67 a month. It's been flawless though and my speed via fast.com right now is 1.0Gbps/120Mb which is decent.

[Captain_Morgan]

JohnnyUK said:

Thanks both

Oh indeed! I'm with you.

Entirely a waste of money / effort, but....ticks a box somewhere in California!

As has been said it’s unlikely to add significant resiliency / redundancy.

It’s worth checking if that is there aim or if they are seeking to isolate work traffic from domestic traffic, if that’s the case then there are options but they would generally require an investment above & beyond ‘normal’ domestic fw/router/switch/accesspoint hardware.

If they are seeking to add resilience to the connection then starlink is an option but again above & beyond the cost of the starlink hw & monthly’s you’ll need more advanced networking hw to use both connections.

Best check out there requirements.

Edit: Apologies I missed you already have a load balancing device, out of interest what device is it?

[JohnnyUK]

Captain_Morgan said:

As has been said it’s unlikely to add significant resiliency / redundancy.

It’s worth checking if that is there aim or if they are seeking to isolate work traffic from domestic traffic, if that’s the case then there are options but they would generally require an investment above & beyond ‘normal’ domestic fw/router/switch/accesspoint hardware.

If they are seeking to add resilience to the connection then starlink is an option but again above & beyond the cost of the starlink hw & monthly’s you’ll need more advanced networking hw to use both connections.

Best check out there requirements.

Edit: Apologies I missed you already have a load balancing device, out of interest what device is it?

Thanks for your reply.

I'm going to try to convince them to fund this, as I already have a Ubiquiti set up:

https://eu.store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-...

My old router is a LRT224 Dual WAN Business Gigabit VPN Router, somewhere in the loft!

[Captain_Morgan]

JohnnyUK said:

Thanks for your reply.

I'm going to try to convince them to fund this, as I already have a Ubiquiti set up:

https://eu.store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-...

My old router is a LRT224 Dual WAN Business Gigabit VPN Router, somewhere in the loft!

I haven’t used one myself but I recall seeing a review on them a wile back & recall the cutover wasn’t instant, ~60 plus seconds, plus I (very) vaguely recall some issues with sim’s keep alive usage but that have been simply a payg issue.

If you are already in the unifi eco system the dream machine pro se might be a better bet as I understand it now supports dual wan load balancing.

If not a more cost effective option might be a pfsense router with home brew or netgates hw, if home brew there are quite a few 2.5G capable devices available if 2.5Gb is of use to your network.

I appreciate that with a 1G fttp line wan load balancing might not be necessary it’s more the confidence that you know the backup line is always active & monitored.

[JohnnyUK]

Captain_Morgan said:

I haven’t used one myself but I recall seeing a review on them a wile back & recall the cutover wasn’t instant, ~60 plus seconds, plus I (very) vaguely recall some issues with sim’s keep alive usage but that have been simply a payg issue.

If you are already in the unifi eco system the dream machine pro se might be a better bet as I understand it now supports dual wan load balancing.

If not a more cost effective option might be a pfsense router with home brew or netgates hw, if home brew there are quite a few 2.5G capable devices available if 2.5Gb is of use to your network.

I appreciate that with a 1G fttp line wan load balancing might not be necessary it’s more the confidence that you know the backup line is always active & monitored.

Agreed - thank you