There are many ways to bond multiple lines together and there are different reasons for wanting to do this. The main reasons are:
In many locations, the total bandwidth offered by a single broadband line is insufficient to be useful.
This could be because extremely high bandwidth is required (for example, for transmitting large video files from place to place) or because the premises is located far away from any high bandwidth connectivity (for example, on a farm a long distance from the local exchange).
Multiple lines increases the chance that your Internet connection will still be working in the event of a fault on on of the lines. We can even mix FTTC, ADSL, FTTP lines to increase that chance further as well as using our Ethernet and L2TP products.
Our Office::1 tariff includes all you need to have a bonded Internet connection. The package includes the lines and the FireBrick router pre-configured for you.
Multiple SoHo:::1 lines can be bonded together.
As with SoHo::1, multiple Home:::1 lines can be bonded together.
Using our FireBrick router
We have pages on our knoweldge base with configuration help for various routers such as Cisco, RouterOS and Linux.
Bonding and load balancing
Load balancing or load sharing is a technique used by other devices, and indeed can be configured on the FireBrick. But it is generally an inferior technique, since it randomly allocates sessions over two or more links on a per session basis. This means a single TCP session transfer cannot utilise all the links; only being able to use the capacity of one. It can still offer load aggregation, especially if there is a large number of client devices, all needing access. But it's technically inferior in most cases. The FireBrick does true "per packet" bonding.
