Skip Navigation
Homepage » News Archive » View News Item 3327

New bonding software to allow higher speeds over broadband
Thursday 06 December 2007 11:57:49 by Andrew Ferguson

Bonding of ADSL lines to create faster downstream and upstream links is nothing new and a number of providers already do this to give people the speeds they want at a fraction of the price of a traditional leased line.

Until now, bonding has been an activity not supported by BT Wholesale, but this is set to change with the SharedBand bonding software that BT Wholesale is selling.

Bonding for those that don't know is the process of joining several broadband connections (ADSL, wireless, cable, leased line), for example four 2Mbps Max ADSL lines bonded give an 8Mbps downstream and 1.6Mbps upstream. The difficult area is splitting a single download over the four lines. Some bonding solutions simply load balance, i.e. any single download will only go at the speed of one line, but multiple downloads are possible.

"The average loop length in the US is a lot bigger than it is here, so a lot of people get very poor speeds,

In fact, the UK is one of the tougher markets to launch in.

The problem now is the upstream speed. New applications, such as VoIP, remote backup and VPNs, require upstream bandwidth that is just not available with standard broadband."

Keith Collins (Sales and Marketing Director), SharedBand

Interestingly, the client end software resides in the ADSL router, and the Netgear DG834 range seems to be the device they are working with currently. The company was founded by Paul Evans in 2003, who had previously led the Internet Infrastructure lab at BT. The original article is over on TechWorld.com and the US market which SharedBand are looking to break into is covered by TelephonyOnline.com.

How successful this venture is will depend greatly on the price, and whether consumers and small businesses opt for Annex M ADSL2+ which offers upload speeds of around 2Mbps by sacrificing a small amount of downstream speed. Be offer the high upstream product on its Be Pro product for £22 a month, and companies like UK Online Premier Broadband offer a 1Mbps upload for £24.99 a month. Many parts of the UK don't have the ADSL2+ options currently so for those wanting extra speed now - bonding is perhaps the most cost effective route.

[ Topic: Broadband | 42 comments | link to this item ]
Digg this Add to del.icio.us

Comments

Posted by herdwick over 2 years ago
presumably BT Wholesale are selling to SPs who will sell the solution to end users ?
Posted by prohack over 2 years ago
According to Sharedband's website, both KeyConnect and Talk Internet currently sell it
Posted by hoodamanny over 2 years ago
This is really just a hack... They talked about bonding back in the early adsl days (and isdn days) you can hardly compare to having fibre to the home. I hope the government builds it and spins it off as a rival to bt. Its the only way to break the bt monopoly. 2 x telecom cos is good for uk
Posted by 2doorsbob over 2 years ago
looks good to me but it means lining bt's pockets with more line rental fee's for them to provide you with 2 or 3 lines with poor line quality instead of the one single line that should support more of the so called upto figure that isp's are so quick to sell you..i bet bt may thick about investing more into ridding the local loop of aliminium if they where forced to discount peoples line rental based on attenuation and other service affecting issues
Posted by rizanur over 2 years ago
IPSEC, L2TP! Only PPTP does limits it's use. Also, the speed is not the total of all lines. Instead it is the multiple of the slowest line. I.e. One 2 Mbps and one 4 Mbps line forms a 4 M bps line only, not a 6 Mbps line as the marketing blurb makes you to believe.
Posted by russpcs over 2 years ago
I can confirm that when using 2x max lines, throughput can vary, but 1.4m-bit/sec can be achieved downstream and 170k / sec upstream.
Also, if one line runs at 4000k and one at 6000k, then the combined speed would be 10mb.
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
quote"Until now, bonding has been an activity not supported by BT Wholesale, but this is set to change with the SharedBand bonding software that BT Wholesale is selling."

Here we go again... Welcome once AGAIN to the 21st century BT LOL

I cant wait to see how much the jokers charge for this.
Posted by 2doorsbob over 2 years ago
buck rogers in the 25th century may stand a better chance lol ..maybe we should try wet string or smoke signals ...
Posted by andrew (Favicon staff member) over 2 years ago
UK already has two local loops covering 40-50% of households, is a third needed? Or just needed in areas where cable networks are present?

As for all the BT lol - perhaps people would prefer an announcement the BT group was to withdraw its wholesale and retail ADSL products.
Posted by Jamiepw over 2 years ago
Not to mention the associated lag with the bonding technology, i cannot quote the figures, but with multiple lines it can be enough to effect some low lag needed applications.
Posted by Kempy over 2 years ago
There's a lot more to this product. The aggregation is done at the packet level. It enables you to use more than one ISP for more resilience. Where the line characteristics are different at the customers location (most installations in the UK) weighting of the lines are implemented to maximise throughput. Its a good business solution for the majority of companies who need resilience and more bandwidth now.

Prices are clearly displayed http://www.keconnectgroup.co.uk/index.cfm?page=1624
Posted by herdwick over 2 years ago
Two sharedband lines (both interleaved) here ping the BBC at 36 ms which is within a ms or two of their native performance.

russpcs meant to say 1.4 MBytes/s down and 170 kbytes/s up.

Different capacity lines can be weighted so you get more than N * the slowest.

"IPSEC over L2TP is currently under development"
Posted by harrys over 2 years ago
apparently it was not supported by BT but there will still other solutions on the market. a quick bonded adsl search shows a company named xrio also do this during the time BT didnt support bonded internet
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
quote"As for all the BT lol - perhaps people would prefer an announcement the BT group was to withdraw its wholesale and retail ADSL products."
I wouldnt care im LLU LMAO
Posted by martinsaunders over 2 years ago
I'm going to hold my pedant flag up here and claim this isn't proper 'bonding'. In my mind its simple line sharing, where I think I'm right in saying that with a single session download will only go as quick as one of the links. Not sure how the thinkbroadband speed test will work on this, I think that tests using several concurrent sessions doesn't it?

Either way, this isn't bonding in my mind.
Posted by herdwick over 2 years ago
"I think I'm right in saying that with a single session download will only go as quick as one of the links. " this is not correct Martin. It is per packet inverse multiplexing and as Russpcs says a single FTP or WGET download or upload from a single PC will run at ~90% of the *combined* line capacity.

Whether it is bonding or not depends on your definition of bonding I guess.
Posted by herdwick over 2 years ago
Sharedband TBB speedtest result :-
12018.20 Kbps 721.99 Kbps
2 * Max Home lines
Posted by andrew (Favicon staff member) over 2 years ago
Our speedtest is a single download thread I believe
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
quote"this is not correct Martin. It is per packet inverse multiplexing and as Russpcs says a single FTP or WGET download or upload from a single PC will run at ~90% of the *combined* line capacity."

That is of course if the delightful BT hasnt throttled you and your http, ftp and whatever else they feel like to death already. On their "UNLIMITED" *cough* lines.
Posted by herdwick over 2 years ago
CARPETBURN your obsession is getting the better of you. BT don't throttle my lines at all.
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
BT throttle and restrict services, you only have to read the forums here to see that.
They also have the nerve to call a service unlimited and bury away in small print its subject to a FUP, infact its burried away much more than alot of providers. You say my obsession is getting the better of me, I think your obsession to defend them GOT the better of you long ago.
Posted by herdwick over 2 years ago
just trying to get some balance to misleading drivel posting by obsessed lunatics.

This news item is nothing at all to do with BT the retail ISP, it is about a technology that BT Wholesale are going to sell to any retail ISP or 3rd party.

Blathering on about alleged throttling is completely off-topic.
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
quote"just trying to get some balance"

Er ok...

quote"Blathering on about alleged throttling is completely off-topic."

1 There is nothing alleged about it, have you not read the burried away BT terms, obviously you have not or obviously by alleged you must mean what they allege against thereself
2 I thought you wanted balance, seeing as this is a story about a service which allows speed to be improved, the balnce weight of throttles they apply is perfectly valid.
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
quote"This news item is nothing at all to do with BT the retail ISP, it is about a technology that BT Wholesale are going to sell to any retail ISP or 3rd party."

Oh i see you want to discuss purely what they flog to other ISPs and not the residential side of things and the service users can actually end up getting... How silly of me the service limitations when it reaches the customers reading here are of no validity or use at all, nobody wants to know their shiney new bonded service may be throttled, do they?
Posted by Kempy over 2 years ago
Have any of you posters here tried the service?

Because if you had you would find that with some intervention from the ISP the product is
a) a proper bonded solution
b) it can properly bond two separate ISP's services together
3) provide increased throughput
4) the product presents a single IP address for the two lines
5) I understand it is patented technology
6) it works
Posted by Kempy over 2 years ago
Furthermore the alleged off-topic point about throttling may be significant, if your ISP has too many subscribers for the amount of back-haul purchased, everybody on that ISP gets a slow connection, so you could improve things by adding a FleXiBand Line, improve your speed and get more resilience.
Posted by Kempy over 2 years ago
What's more neither KeConnect or Talk Internet buy it from BT Wholesale :o) And 2doorsbob, you don't have to 'line BT's pockets' by renting a BT Line if you don't want to, rent your line from the ISP.
Posted by PeteK over 2 years ago
But all of this is just fluff, we still deliver bonded services over MLPPP, per packet or per session load balancing depending on the requirement from the customer. BT quoting none support for MLPPP has been around for years but it doesn't prevent its delivery. Long lines work great with per packet LB, shorter ones with MLPPP. We have customers with 2 to 8 lines on both Cisco and Linux routers and I will happily continue selling to these folks at what is only the cost of two pieces of copper, two DSL connections and a CPE.
Posted by herdwick over 2 years ago
"Oh i see you want to discuss purely what they flog to other ISPs" in a vague attempt to stay on topic I would like to discuss the Sharedband (or other) bonding solution as per the news item. BT Retail are not offering this service so there is no interaction between their alleged throttling and this product.

If you wish to wage some campaign about what a particular retail ISP may or may not be doing in every news item on here it gets very tedious. You don't use BT Retail and nor do I so it is utterly pointless discussing it.
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
quote"If you wish to wage some campaign about what a particular retail ISP may or may not be doing in every news item on here it gets very tedious. You don't use BT Retail and nor do I so it is utterly pointless discussing it."

The story mentions BT last time i checked the wholesale and retail companies were still part of the BT groups. The story mentions MAX services... Throttling occurs on MAX based products bonded or not so the point is entirely on topic like it or not. Defend away but thems the facts.
Posted by isinix over 2 years ago
You don't need a second line at your premises for this to work . The second line could be further down the street , a mile away or even on a different exchange.
Posted by Kempy over 2 years ago
(Sigh) This product is not MLPP. We (KeConnect) already offer MLPP bonding using CISCO kit. To bond two services successfully using the CISCO Solution you need two lines from one ISP. This solution does not. It is also using commodity priced equipment. The CISCO solution does not.
The main drawback of the CISCO solution is that it is only double the slowest line, unlike this product. Its a product that has a commercial place in the market. Like I posted earlier, has anyone tried it before condemning it as 'fluff'?
Posted by rasczak over 2 years ago
Can you please show proof Carpetburn, that BT Wholesale put specific throttles in place on MaxADSL lines where these throttles are not either at the request or under the control of an ISP, whether that be a BT group ISP or not.
Posted by prohack over 2 years ago
UNBELIEVABLE! The detractors above appear to be the ones who haven't tried it and the defenders are the current users. Is this really an IT product or the figment of my imagination! Well done to Sharedband for persuading BT to offer customers more
Posted by sponge34 over 2 years ago
we have a bonded adsl solution from Managed Communications - dunno what technology it uses but it it works with, in our case, two BT MaxADSL enabled lines. It presents 1 IP address at the bonding device, which I assume is just a custom router running software similar to that which BT are reported to be supplying.
I seem to recall them mentioning that it works with different ISPs on the ADSL lines as well.
We have achieved download speeds of up to 14Mbps. The technology is out there and it works.
YMMV of course.
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
So how much does are people paying for this new bonded solution?
Posted by 2doorsbob over 2 years ago
kempy renting the line from my isp is not going to improve my line quality.. and bt dont lease then to isps for nothing..i was pointing out that maybe if we all and nice copper running to our cabs and our homes the need to look for ways to improve bandwidth may not be as urgent
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
So nobody thats actually using this (claims to be using it) want to comment on the price, and how it compares both pricing and speed wise to the storys mention ukonlin and bethere products???
Posted by prohack over 2 years ago
KeConnect prices are clearly shown on their web site. The following link should give you the information requested
http://www.keconnect.co.uk/products/business/broadband/bonded/
Note that they market the product as flexiband
Posted by CARPETBURN over 2 years ago
quote"KeConnect prices are clearly shown on their web site"
Thanks for that so am i right from readin that link you pay for each connection (call it 20 quid per connection, seems thats their lowest max price product) and then on top you pay either £10 per connection if the connections are with keconnect or £15 if they are with someone else... Could be ideal for someone that wants speed but still only uses their connection lightly.
Posted by Kempy over 2 years ago
Sorry for not keeping up with the postings - been away. The product is designed to use commodity priced kit - i.e. Netgear and Lynksys (shortly). cost of the kit makes it an easy entry point with fail-over and bandwidth aggregation. By that I mean if you have a MAX line with 2Mbps and another with 4mbps it can be weighted to use these lines. 30 lines configured so far and growing - so definitely a commercial product.
Posted by Kempy over 2 years ago
2doorsbob - your right renting the line does not alter the quality, but it does save you money :o)which was your point I believe. As to quality - that's as much down to the back-haul the ISP has in their core network as to the distance from the exchange.
You must be logged in to post comments. Click here to login.