2 Broadband providers same house

[Colbaker]

Hi all,

I work from home and require an my internet to be up for 9 hours minimum per day constantly Remote Desktop and VOIP line, I have VM fibre at the moment which is fine for nearly all the time but understandably they are not up 100% of the time, which is why their will be no point in me upgrading to a business line, if it’s down, it’s down, no matter if I pay the extra for a business line, so I was thinking of getting a cheap ADSL line.

I should be able to do this shouldn’t I?, can I use the existing phone line which is currently set up with Virgin media (and I get a monthly
Reduction in my VM broadband and TV for having it), or would they have to run another line?

 

[WJA96]

You’ll need a completely new phone line. I can highly recommend Vodafone business. £23.50+VAT per month for up to 76/20Mbps VDSL with a small install fee £70-ish. And you get a fixed IP address in that price if that’s important.

 

[Colbaker]

You’ll need a completely new phone line. I can highly recommend Vodafone business. £23.50+VAT per month for up to 76/20Mbps VDSL with a small install fee £70-ish. And you get a fixed IP address in that price if that’s important.

Thanks for the recommendation, really looking for the cheapest one possible as I may only use it once every couple of months for a maximum of a day, I may even go many months without having to use it, no fixed IP required.

Although I don’t mind paying 70pound for an install, thinking about it am even thinking about maybe getting A pay as you go 4G dongle to plug into my router, if there is such a thing

 

[TJM]

4G routers are a thing and supplied by some ISPs to customers during outages, so that could be a good option.

You might want to measure how much data is used by your business connection on a normal day and see how much it would cost on a pay as you go 4G plan if the connection was down for a working week. It might well be more than the annual cost of a DSL service and wouldn't be as reliable.

 

[pepp77]

Post Office standard ADSL is £17 a month - would give you what you need.

 

[Quartz]

Thanks for the recommendation, really looking for the cheapest one possible as I may only use it once every couple of months for a maximum of a day, I may even go many months without having to use it, no fixed IP required.

Having a second line would enable you to have one line for private internet use (and business backup) and the other for business.

Draytek do routers which can manage two internet connections with auto fail-over, and I believe (BICBW) you can set them so that VLAN A prefers to use connection X and VLAN B prefers to use connection Y.

 

[~cw]

You don't have to spend megabucks for a second line if you only need it occasionally. Unfortunately a Virgin copper line just goes back to a krone block in their street cab, voice service only.

If you're extra unlucky, when Virgin/ntl/Telewest cabled your property the engineer may have hijacked the BT master socket to provide Virgin phone service. That's against BT's rules (everything up to and including the NTE is their property and responsibility) but most people don't realise. It might cost £££ to get a new master socket installed if the drop cable's been cut incoming to the property. If this is the case chez vous, pray for a nice Openreach engineer.

Plusnet is my secondary connection, they provide line rental as well so it's easy should there be a line fault. I got them to price match a recent NOW TV broadband offer which included anytime calls to UK landlines and mobiles - £18.99 a month! Not bad.

I have an Asus RT-AC66U B1 running MerlinWRT firmware, one of its useful features is dual WAN if you're thusly inclined. I have fibre for my main connection and I kept the ADSL2+ as a backup, that runs over a retro ZYXEL P660R-D1 running PPPoE which the Asus authenticates to. Works great, minimal connectivity loss as it detects WAN1 loss and reroutes (a few seconds). IIRC you can set it to springloaded or to stay on the active WAN once flipped.

(However at the moment the Asus is running solely on the DSL...)

 

[Caged]

Presumably you have a mobile phone - can you not just tether this in emergencies?

 

[~cw]

OP mentioned VoIP as well, most of those don't have wifi

 

[Avalon]

Having a dedicated line installed with a separate service for what could be by your own admission as little as few days a year doesn’t make a lot of sense at face value, especially as ADSL can/will go down as well. The odds of either type of service being down on the very small number of days you use it seems low, why not look at sticking with what you have and an unlimited 4G addon *if* required. That way you aren’t paying several hundred pounds a year for something that by your own admission you will barely use.

Post Office standard ADSL is £17 a month - would give you what you need.

Has the op done something horrible to you? Perhaps murdered your entire family or had intimate relations with your family pet and made you watch? I only ask as of all the companies i’ve had the misfortune to have to deal with, the track record for national outages, security issues, technical support and general incompetence, I can’t see why anyone would mention the Post Office, let alone recommend them to others unless you’re some sort of connectivity sadomasochist?

 

[Deleted member 77746]

If it's for business and you need it up all the time then do not skimp on cost. A cheap ADSL line will give you no end end of problems. Just get two FTTC lines and a router that is capable of running two lines at once. Might cost you but if you had downtime would you lose more money than it's worth?

 

[Steveocee]

Unless it comes with a specific SLA in regards to up time then you can expect it to go down at some point. DSL services tagged with "business" don't mean they will be any more reliable than a residential counterpart and you certainly don't have the ability to phone up when it goes down and demand it is fixed because it is a business service.

If you want guarantees of uptime then you're talking a couple hundred per month minimum (best case).

 

[pepp77]

Has the op done something horrible to you? Perhaps murdered your entire family or had intimate relations with your family pet and made you watch? I only ask as of all the companies i’ve had the misfortune to have to deal with, the track record for national outages, security issues, technical support and general incompetence, I can’t see why anyone would mention the Post Office, let alone recommend them to others unless you’re some sort of connectivity sadomasochist?

Never used them myself, i just thought as its a backup line ADSL would be cheaper and these came up as cheapest

 

[WJA96]

Having a dedicated line installed with a separate service for what could be by your own admission as little as few days a year doesn’t make a lot of sense at face value, especially as ADSL can/will go down as well. The odds of either type of service being down on the very small number of days you use it seems low, why not look at sticking with what you have and an unlimited 4G addon *if* required. That way you aren’t paying several hundred pounds a year for something that by your own admission you will barely use.

An unlimited 4G SIM card is going to be as expensive as another VDSL line.

Unless it comes with a specific SLA in regards to up time then you can expect it to go down at some point. DSL services tagged with "business" don't mean they will be any more reliable than a residential counterpart and you certainly don't have the ability to phone up when it goes down and demand it is fixed because it is a business service.

If you want guarantees of uptime then you're talking a couple hundred per month minimum (best case).

This is true. The best Virgin Media Business SLA is 12 hours to fix. Before you can start to claim something off your next bill. Not that they'll actually fix it. Just before you can claim something off your next bill. And I don't really know anyone who will guarantee uptime. Our office leased line provider (Daisy) guarantees an engineer on site within 1 hour but that's still not actually a fix.

 

[Semple]

Do you work from home, or do you run a business from home?

That's the key part here, if you're actually running a business from home that requires a 100% uptime connection, then you need to lease a business line and not skimp on the costs. SLAs will dictate providers prioritise any repairs if a line goes down - that's what you pay the money for.

If you just work from home, then presumably your employer isn't willing to fund a business line, and rather than stumping up a fair amount of cash for something that may only get a few hours use each year, you'd probably be better off looking at a better phone contract that allows unlimited tethering that you can then use in emergencies.

 

[Semple]

This is true. The best Virgin Media Business SLA is 12 hours to fix. Before you can start to claim something off your next bill. Not that they'll actually fix it. Just before you can claim something off your next bill. And I don't really know anyone who will guarantee uptime. Our office leased line provider (Daisy) guarantees an engineer on site within 1 hour but that's still not actually a fix.

That's really their get out clause if there's a tricky fault that they're struggling to troubleshoot. You can only guarantee 6 nines of uptime if you know without a shadow of doubt that you can resolve whatever issue may exist, and very quickly (or have some sort of redundancy in place).

 

[Terminal_Boy]

Thanks for the recommendation, really looking for the cheapest one possible as I may only use it once every couple of months for a maximum of a day, I may even go many months without having to use it, no fixed IP required.

Although I don’t mind paying 70pound for an install, thinking about it am even thinking about maybe getting A pay as you go 4G dongle to plug into my router, if there is such a thing

Check how strong the 4G service you get in the room you plan to use the router/dongle in. The lower the signal, the lower the throughput and at edge of cell, you might not get offered any connections at all.

 

[Avalon]

An unlimited 4G SIM card is going to be as expensive as another VDSL line.

Either you're on the most expensive tariff i've seen in a decade, or you missed the add-on part - many operators allow you to add on a higher or unlimited data pack for 30 days or upgrade/downgrade your plan, given it's for emergency use and the odds of it being needed are pretty low to begin with, it's worth looking into. Heck even having a pre-pay SIM and dongle ready to rock if required would be cheaper than an ongoing line+connection cost.

 

[Caged]

OP mentioned VoIP as well, most of those don't have wifi

A TP Link TL-WR902AC can work as a wireless client, so you can connect to your phone and then feed the connection into WAN2 of whatever router you end up picking. I can see a use case for a dedicated mobile SIM and modem to fail over to, but not when this just needs to support one person.