I’m familiar with load balancing… but Is it possible to actually bond multiple DSL lines together? I hear of ways to bond using MLPPP but that requires support from an ISP. Is there a way to actually bond without support from my ISP, or use say a cable modem and a DSL line together for faster speed / diversity?
Not in the way you bond Ethernet interfaces, but there are commercial routers that will do balancing and failover with two broadband connections. Unfortunately they are not common or cheap. If you wanted to home brew you’d have to do a bit of reading on LARTC (search for it).
You can’t bond without a point to point connection so we overcome that limitation with vUnity datacenters as the other virtual point. We support the bonding of multiple DSL using GRE tunnels over each link. Standard offering is four 10Mbps DSL lines providing automatic fault tollerance and 40Mbps.
See FAQ’s at vUnity
Thanks,
-Brian
Brian J. Brandon
vUnity, Inc Los Angeles
1-877-248-5354
MLPPP does require coordination with your ISP as it requires the DSLAM to have a line card with MLPPP support. MLPPP is essentially layer1/layer2 and has to be deployed by the carrier who operates the DSLAM. That’s why you don’t see it out there much as it is very expensive to upgrade each DSLAM. However as ken_yap mentioned, there are devices for load-balancing (serving the session to a WAN link and load-balancing the sessions). However, this would not enable you with higher speeds (as your connection will only be on one of the links at any given time) or wouldn’t give you the auto fail-over without loosing your session. There is a recent technology called “Broadband Bonding” that enables true bonding which increases your speed and provides the auto fail-over in case any of the lines fail, pretty much like MLPPP but without the ISP involvement. I have in the past installed several of these units when I was an IT consultant, they really saved the day for us. The brand we were using was Mushroom Networks. There were a few others who claimed bonding, but the ones we tested were all load-balancers except the Mushroom box.