I signed up for the new 25Mbps VDSL services that are becoming available through TekSavvy, now that Bell has to provide speed matching profiles to other providers instead of just the staid old 5Mbps profiles they used to offer.
The techs were done by the time I got home, but one of them was nice enough to install a proper POTS splitter for me, which was nice. According to the person present at the time, he said something to the effect of “I don’t know if I’m supposed to do this, but I think Mike will appreciate it”.
My router is a Xen virtual machine, running a hardware virtualized FreeBSD instance, with three NICs passed to it using PCI passthrough. I use packet filter for the firewall and traffic shaping, and MPD5 to handle the actual MLPPP tunnel.
Once I got home I connected the router to the cellpipe modem, and right away the PPPoE came up. Subsequent testing showed that I actually got slightly better performance by configuring mpd to bring up two full tunnels on the single line and then bond them together than I did by having mpd bring up just a single MLPPP enabled tunnel.
I had been concerned that the virtual machine wouldn’t be up to the task, but it appears that isn’t much of a concern. I haven’t done any testing with new MTU/MRU values yet, so there’s still a possibility of improving performance slightly from here, but I’m already getting pretty much what was promised, so I don’t know how much further it could go.