Broadband

Bonding multiple lines

There are many ways to bond multiple lines together and there are different reasons for wanting to do this. The main reasons are:

  • Increased upload and download bandwidth
  • Added redundancy

Bonding

Increased bandwidth

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).

Added redundancy

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.

Which tariffs can be bonded?

Office::1

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.

SoHo::1

Multiple SoHo:::1 lines can be bonded together.

Home::1

As with SoHo::1, multiple Home:::1 lines can be bonded together.

Required equipment

Using our FireBrick router

Using your own router

We have pages on our knoweldge base with configuration help for various routers such as Cisco, RouterOS and Linux.

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.

Contact Sales

email sales@aa.net.uk
phone 03333 400222
(Mon-Fri 9am-5pm)
sms 01344 400222

Contact Support

email support@aa.net.uk
phone 03333 400999
(Mon-Fri 8am-6pm,
Sat 10am-2pm)
sms 01344 400999