Bonded ADSL

B

bravo16

Active Member
Joined
Mar 7, 2005
Messages
30
Reaction score
0
Due to a new project at our company that involves rolling out Terminal Services to 20+ branches and 250+ users, and our servers located in a central location we had to find a cost effective solution for the 512k upload limit on ADSL. We have successfully bonded 4 Adsl lines for a total of 1.8mb/s upload speed. This was all done in house with our current router setup. We now serve TS to 30+ users per site without breaking a sweat. I wanted to mention this because of the line bonding/line balancing argument a while ago. True ADSL Line bonding is possible.
 
Last edited:
We have a setup close to yours with MS terminal services, but also have geographic load-balancing between our Primary and DR sites.

We did'nt go the ADSL bonding route, but went with Elfiq load balancers - www.elfiq.com, which essentially load balancers amongst various internet/private links. We are currently load balancing 12 ADSL links, inbound and outbound traffic - the solution works very well, and users are happy, performance TS and other services has been greatly improved.

It help us reduce telco costs drastically, we removed some of our existing expensive diginet links after implementing this solution.
 
SolarWinds said:
We have a setup close to yours with MS terminal services, but also have geographic load-balancing between our Primary and DR sites.

We did'nt go the ADSL bonding route, but went with Elfiq load balancers - www.elfiq.com, which essentially load balancers amongst various internet/private links. We are currently load balancing 12 ADSL links, inbound and outbound traffic - the solution works very well, and users are happy, performance TS and other services has been greatly improved.

It help us reduce telco costs drastically, we removed some of our existing expensive diginet links after implementing this solution.
Click to expand...

We originally had a load balancing system in place, but what we found is the bandwidth spikes for TS are quite great. Now with the bonding we get 800k spikes for only about a second.
 
Last edited:
We are still considering how to handle this knowledge, before we release. We are under the impression (mistaken?) that outside fishbone and i think techconcepts.co.za we are the only people that has successfully got it working. Some feedback would be nice from the community.
 
specs we can give so far

Here is what bravo16 and I are doing and why...

We needed a VPN from site to site that could give us at least 1.5mbts throughput. No round robin connections, we wanted a bonded line that gives us 1 VPN tunnel. So in short, bonding and not load balancing.

Now as most of you know, ADSL in ZA has an upload speed of 512kbps and that's that. (As of the time of writing, we are not aware of any faster upload speeds available for ADSL lines.)

So this was the pickle, and we decided that bonding was our only option.

We use 2 to 8 lines per side, giving us a minimum of 720kbts and a max of 3.6mbts throughput on our biggest links. The idea is that with up to 8 lines we get a theoretical 8 x 512k uplink speed.
There was quite a bit of work done in order to get it to work nice and stable. Our beta period ended on Friday and we have 0.0001% packet loss on our link so far. This has been running solid without fault for almost a week now.

We found that bonding also made the overall link more stable as individual lines can resync without dropping the whole bonded link.

So…. who is interested and what are your needs...?

More later, if there is interest.

R

-=real-digital-ninja=-
 
Any one running fishbone? Can you provide some feedback on how the service performs with site to site VPN's?
 
bravo16 said:
We originally had a load balancing system in place, but what we found is the bandwidth spikes for TS are quite great. Now with the bonding we get 800k spikes for only about a second. Best of all we used our current routing equipment our total cost to supply upstream is under R2000 line rental for the 4 lines, but we have 9 lines in total we will ad to bonding and R12 per MB ISP cost. next to R16000 for fishbone I recon its not a bad deal.
Click to expand...

R16000 for fishbone???
I have the Tech Concepts one with 5 adsl's and I am only paying a little over R2500
Are you including bandwidth?
 
killkom said:
R16000 for fishbone???
I have the Tech Concepts one with 5 adsl's and I am only paying a little over R2500
Are you including bandwidth?
Click to expand...

Hi Killkom,

the R16000 for fishbone is the biggest router for 300+ users and 100gb of data per month. How much traffic are you guys sending through your tech concepts lines?
 
I'm still quite curious as how you've done the line bonding without equipment on the ISP side. I know you can do load balancing, but then you have x amount of IP addresses for x amount of ADSL lines, unlike line bonding where you have 1 IP address for x amount of ADSL lines.

I know its not ideal, but you can register a couple of IP addresses for a single DNS record and then the clients might connect on some form of round robin scheme, but this is still considered as load balancing!

If your technology is really providing line bonding without having to have a special ISP with line bonding equipment on their side too, then I'm pretty sure that you could patent your technology and make quite a lot of money :D
 
Wow, ok here goes again

If we tell you everything then we don't have jobs. So it's a bit hard to comply with the "share the secret" requests. Let me make it clearer than our vague attempts at explaining this with our first and more suttle aproach.

WE CAN'T TELL YOU!!!! :cry:

This whole thread got a bit side tracked. The question was and still is: Is anyone interested?

The original post was to get everyone "wet" and to see how much interest there was/is.

So who needs this and what do you want it for? We would love to hear any questions or comments about our project. Can this help you or fix your company's problem?

R
 
Pada said:
I'm still quite curious as how you've done the line bonding without equipment on the ISP side. I know you can do load balancing, but then you have x amount of IP addresses for x amount of ADSL lines, unlike line bonding where you have 1 IP address for x amount of ADSL lines.

I know its not ideal, but you can register a couple of IP addresses for a single DNS record and then the clients might connect on some form of round robin scheme, but this is still considered as load balancing!

If your technology is really providing line bonding without having to have a special ISP with line bonding equipment on their side too, then I'm pretty sure that you could patent your technology and make quite a lot of money :D
Click to expand...

1 x ftp transfer (without making more than 1 connection) sent 140MB file at 1.732mbts in our testing, so no load balancing. And you are right, it's a really nice toy to have.

I'm going to post some screenshots of it working and the throughput it gives later.
 
Oh and that FTP test was done with 3 ADSLs on the one side and 1 ADSL on the client side.
 
AnRkey said:
If we tell you everything then we don't have jobs. So it's a bit hard to comply with the "share the secret" requests. Let me make it clearer than our vague attempts at explaining this with our first and more suttle aproach.

WE CAN'T TELL YOU!!!! :cry:

This whole thread got a bit side tracked. The question was and still is: Is anyone interested?

The original post was to get everyone "wet" and to see how much interest there was/is.

So who needs this and what do you want it for? We would love to hear any questions or comments about our project. Can this help you or fix your company's problem?

R
Click to expand...

Do you really think this is going to stay secret for long once you start implementing it seeing it requires no specialist/proprietary equipment? You won't be able to stop other people looking at it and spreading the information.

Edit:
I have one question for you, I'm assuming the bonding takes place between the end sites and not between a end site and the isp?

Your scenario differs a bit from the average person that wants to bond multiple adsl links to the ISP and I can roughly picture in my mind how your implementation works & the VPN makes it easier. I also doubt it is true 'bonding' seeing bonding operates at layer2 so you must be bonding at the transport layer which means it's end to end bonding transparent to physical network carrying the traffic so the ISP plays no role. RTP might play some role here.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X