Count me in now as another happy camper in the Tomato patch.

After our recent DSL woes, I decided that a second DSL line might be a good investment while sorting out the primary line, so we had a second pair installed.

Meanwhile, the first pair is also working reliably again now, after multiple visits by various grades of Bell workmen.

So.. bonding the two lines using ML-PPP seemed the obvious thing to do, especially as we have TekSavvy as the ISP on the new/second line.

And for that, I decided to finally entrust firewall/router duties to a WRT54GS that we've had on the shelf here for a couple of years.

The WRT is now running Tomato/MLPPP firmware, bonding the two DSL lines together into a much faster connection than we were used to having here in the boonies.

The original line runs with a 2496/640 interleaved profile, and the new line has a 3008/800 interleaved profile. The two DSL lines combine seamlessly into a single connection now, giving 500KB+/sec downloads and better than 130KB/sec uploads. Woohoo!

I know that sounds rather pedestrian to anyone closer to a DSLAM than we are, but to us it's nearly heaven. Especially since a side-effect of ML-PPP is that the local Bell telco's packet-inspection based throttling no longer works!

Tomato itself took some getting used to, as I found the plain paper page menu layout confusing at first (no visible cues as to the existance of sub-menus), but it does make more sense now that we've figured it all out.

Cheers