The Problem

Increasingly I am finding organisations who rely on cloud applications and want to gain all the benefits of improved communications such as Imap or Exchange email accounts , Video Conferencing and In general need greater bandwidth to achieve these things but still only have ADSL internet.  This particular had reasonable ADSL speed at 16mbps down and 1mb up.

The problem with asynchronous DSL is that it in general limits upload bandwidth to approx 1mb which will not service the sorts of needs I have previously mentioned. In addition the particular street where this business was located tended to flood and a marked decrease in bandwidth would occur on those occasions.  Their NBN was not due to be delivered until mid 2019 

I initially thought it was best to update their network infrastructure and replaced their switches with a TP Link 24 port smart switch.

The switch has some nice features such as

• A web interface
• Port Mirroring allowing redirection of all out going traffic to go to a server which then can be analysed by a tool such as Wireshark.
• Loopback Detection
• Line Tests for failing cables

I coupled this with a new ADSL / VDSL and Wireless broadband router the Billion 9800N

Analysis

The replacement of the ageing network equipment in itself did not provide any great increase in bandwidth and employees were tweedling their thumbs for large periods of time waiting for response to webpages and cloud apps. We did get 2 benefits from this change 

• We could eliminate the internal network equipment as an issue.
• We could also could acquire better knowledge of network traffic and get a picture of total bandwidth used.

Bandwidth usage both up and down was approx 150gb per month with days there was a large amount of data needing to be uploaded.

The following table indicates typical daily performance and bandwidth statistics while only using ADSL

                                      Transmit                                  Receive

1. 21 sept                1,294,681,592                       1,366,196,656
2.  
3. 25 sept                771,652,975                          346,734,864
4.  
5. 29 sept                1,470,799,751                       2,767,377,944
6.  
7. 1 oct                    822,130,802                          718,836,984
8.  
9. 2 oct                    1,001,385,454                       3,348,924,359
10.  
11. 3 oct                    20,8042,857                          1,333,293,444
12.  
13. 4 oct                    544,923,293                          3,746,193,439
14.  
15. 9  oct                             565,349,403                          1,992,610,698   

The Solution 

One of the interesting features of the Billion 9800 modem is that it can aggregate or apply outbound Load Balancing across mutliple WAN interfaces so this meant we could attach a wireless broadband adapter and depending on the signal strength and usage within that area there was the possibility of greatly improving overall bandwidth.

By adding a 100gb Wireless broadband plan and load balancing the ADSL and Wireless 4g WAN interfaces we were able to receive 7.6gb of data and send 1,25gb of data within it’s first 5 hours of use.   This sort of performance was something like a 5-6 fold increase in bandwidth and performance.