High-speed broadband with aggregation
FatPipe and Kinetek recently forged a partnership to bring Fatpipe’s RAIL (Redundant Array of Independent Lines) technology to South Africa.
FatPipe’s RAIL technology can aggregate and load-balance over multiple connections and sits between a company’s local area network and the Internet, using two or more connections to any ISP.
Kinetek recently ran trials with ISP SybaWeb, aggregating multiple DSL connections, and the results were promising.
Combining three 4Mbps ADSL lines using the Fatpipe technology, SybaNet achieved a local download speed of 10 416Kbps and a local upload speed of 952Kbps.
When it came to international throughput the results were similar with a download speed of 10 280Kbps and upload speed of 856Kbps.
Latency was also lower than with standard ADSL services, with a ping time to Google.com of 278ms and 192ms to BBC.
“We are glad to say that unlike other technologies on the market, FatPipe provides the technology that works independent of any ISP and can utilise any broadband technology with an ethernet handoff,” says Werner Kruger, technical marketer at Kinetek.
“The entry level products allow companies to make use of four WAN connections and on higher end models it can now go up to 16WAN connections. Speeds of up to 750Mbps have been reached in parts of the world.”
Kruger said that their service provides an opportunity for companies to replace their Diginet links with a technology which not only gives you better throughput speeds, but also creates a redundant and more secure connection at a lower cost.
Growing market
FatPipe is however not the only service is the market today, and there is a growing interest in broadband bonding services to reduce the cost of current Diginet lines.
Competing service provider Technology Concepts (TC), whose ADSL channel-bonding solution combines up to five ADSL lines, recently demonstrated international download speeds of 10 696Kbps and upload speeds of 1 128Kbps using their service.
SA Gateway has also recently announced that they have obtained the rights to distribute WAN load-balancing technology from the US. Tom Muller, the product manager for the Ascenlink, says the solution can practically guarantee 100% uptime by combining a mix of ISPs and technologies.
According to Muller the Ascenlink allows clients to have “five 4Mbps ADSL lines, Diginet and an iBurst connection for backup and then allows you to aggregate that bandwidth together. The largest unit allows for up to 50 WAN connections, providing you with 200 Mbps inbound and 19.2Mbps outbound WAN connections if you use 4Mbps ADSL lines.”
“We have just launched the product but have already implemented it at several large local businesses and other large corporate companies are also currently testing the Ascenlink for their networks,” Muller says.