Tuesday, October 26, 2010

BT Infinity Broadband and Untangle

So a little while ago we decide to upgrade our "Oh crap" fail over broadband line to BT's latest and greatest Infinity offering. Its fairly quick but it most certainly isn't a replacement for a leased line, not even close.

Packet loss horrendous, and trying to use it to upload files via vpn to a remote ESX hosted ms server, forget it. 60MB file failed 4 times, infinity at this end, 100 mb leased line at the other. Call me a skeptic but i'm not about to start blaming the leased line even a little bit.

On the plus side infinity very fast for downloads, and cheaper than our historical BT broadband offering by around £20 per month. No major cost saving but every little helps I guess.

The physical delivery is via a mini fibre nte into BT's fibre hub. Well it was, the BT hub now back in its box where it is staying. Theres a fair amount of noise on the web that you can't use your own router with infinity, YOU CAN! All you need is a cable router that supports PPPOE, and you connect that to the mini NTE, which is to all intents and purposes a modem.

Next post will give a few more details on connecting an Untangle server direct to the mini NTE for all firewall and routing duties.