Line Bonding/Link Aggregation

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matthill2308

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Hi There

Is there any solution to bonding adsl lines (to achieve greater speeds) without any involvement on the ISPs side?
Ie. Buying accounts from 2 or more adsl companies.

Thanks
 
You can always do load balancing, but that won't increase your maximum throughput on a single file download, but it would make a difference if multiple people wants Internet access.

Unfortunately I don't know of any equipment that can do line bonding from only a client side. You'll most likely need some kind of VPN to an ISP that can do like virtual line bonding or you'll need an ISP that has line bonding equipment on the other side.

I haven't done line bonding myself, so I might be wrong in terms of all your options.
 
Hi, thanks for your response.

I found this off another (very) old post on mybroadband, which states that the technology did not need ISP co-operation, let alone even lines from the same ISP! (Hence my complete confusion as to whether this is possible)

Router clustering

Another option for medium and large enterprises is router clustering which ‘enable high-speed data transfer through multiple lines, multiple ISPs, and backbones over WANs with seamless re-assembly of data streams.’

This technology can bond up to 32 WAN connections at once, with entry level products promising speeds of up to 155Mbps. It is technology independent which means that it can bond any broadband service and does not rely on ISP cooperation.

Most promising, however is this http://www.frdmnetworks.com/files/docs/Series/series_bbnavslbr_1.7.pdf with their Freedom 8000 claims to load balance and aggregate with no co-operation from ISP, their table even logs speeds from 6 lines with different ISPs bonded together (Meaning that no VLAN or Trunk from the ISPs side would be needed, because they would be operating on completely different IP/Subnet ranges, possibly even different pipes out of the country?)

As I said, I am very very confused about this technology, but to me it seems like it is possible with additional hardware without ISP co-operation it is possible, but if you do not wish to purchase additional hardware, your ISP must support this.

My problem is that we are a small-medium size company who specializes in tertiary education in the multimedia section.
We are part of a global network of 56 other schools around the globe and so internet bandwidth is key in the smooth day-to-day operations (as all admin systems and websites are supported and hosted globally) - FTPs between campuses etc etc etc.
Due to our location, Wireless Last Mile is not possible and Fibre (although very expensive) cannot be laid as we are situated across a historic square.

Sticky situation.
 
There are two answers to your question, and the solution would depend greatly on your needs for the speed.

A friend of mine has a few 4Mb lines and uses a Netgear router (I'm unsure as to which one) to load balance the lines. It doesn't give lines*speed performance on multiple-connections but it does greatly increase the speed for such. He finds it quite useful for updates and most of his downloads (multi-threaded connections). This would also work fine for several people using the network.

I'm unsure as to how the use of a VPN on such a network would be so can't comment on that.
I wouldn't really recommend a professional line-bonding service for your requirements, not that it doesn't work great, it works pretty well, but rather that it's ridiculously expensive (the bandwidth, that is).
 
Why is Wireless out of the question?

At this very moment Vodacom is installing a microwave dish on our building so that our office can have a direct link to their data center.
 
As Pada said, either you go with an ISP that supports bonding out of the box, such as VOX fishbone -- or you go with bonded VPN endpoints -- or you go with load balancing. The latter two both have their disadvantages (IP overhead & redundant traffic/routing for the VPN option, and the inability to get a combined aggregated throughput for a single thread IP session, with the load-balancing option [because each router/pppoe session will have its own unique routed IP address that the destination can't distinguish as one]). I don't know much about how VOX does their bonding, but I'm guessing it's also VPN based. If it's some kind of multilinking/native bonding protocol that gives you a single IP address and can always utilize all the combined bandwidth, then that's ideal - but that usually doesn't come cheap... If you just want to speed up browsing, load-balancing round-robin transparent squid/lusca setup will be perfect. If you need a combined throughput without breaking the bank, VPN bonding is the way to go. I can vouch from experience that Mikrotik & RouterOS work great for either :)
 
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@froot.

How does your friend benefit from the load balancing if he is just using one machine?
Due to the costs involved in professional line bonding (Another way SA is screwed by ISPs as this is very available in the US+UK)
I may have to settle for Load balancing, it may require more lines than the bonding, but I would just have to spend some time working out the best solution (Speed vs. Bigger Bandwidth Pipe)

@pada.

I am in the CBD of Cape Town surrounded by apartment blocks with a million floors.
I have direct LOS to one high site, but cant seem to find an ISP that has access on it, what does the Vodacom link entail?

Could you maybe outline what my possibilities for connectivity are as all ISPs I have contacted seem to be extremely non-negotiable and unhelpful.

What are your thoughts on the devices I posted above claiming to bond and load balance without co-operation from ISPs? Is it even possible?
 
As mentioned: The load balancing router does not give you faster speeds when using a single-thread or https (since it's often secured via your IP). He benefits when he for instances browses websites - the images, ie, would download via the different adsl connections. When he uses FTP with multiple threads, each thread uses a different adsl connection...
 
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